The Proof is in the Glare
Hassan Wasswa, Abdul Serwadda · 2022
The past few years have seen a rapid growth of video conferencing as a communication mechanism of choice for personal and professional collaboration. This increased dependence on video conferencing brings with it a host of privacy challenges regarding audio/video data that could be inadvertently leaked during a call. In this paper, we show that, even when equipped with anti-glare functionality, eyeglasses worn during a video call could leak information that the user privately views in their computer window. The attack exploits patterns in the eyeglass reflection that despite not being discernible by humans, can be picked up by machine learning algorithms. We rigorously investigate this line of attack under a wide range of environmental conditions (such as room illumination, lighting color temperature, graphical attributes of content viewed, etc) and show it to be highly effective. While video conferencing platforms already obfuscate information in the user's background, they do not yet perform such obfuscation for eyeglass reflections. Our paper calls for the incorporation of filters designed to specifically obfuscate content in eyeglass reflections.