A new open-source called "Chirp" transmits data, such as text messages, between computers (and smartphones) via different sound tones.
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The tool, developed by cybersecurity researcher solst/ICE, maps each character to a specific audio frequency and plays it back along with real-time visualization. Other computers equipped with a microphone running the Chirp tool can record the audio and translate the message back into text.
The project allows users to “pass” messages between devices in a fun way and is available both online and as a standalone application freely available via GitHub. While it’s not terribly practical for most real-world applications due to ambient noise interference, it could prove useful in short-range, offline , and low-power use cases.
A practical limitation of Chirp is that it stops listening for messages during transmission, so anything received during that time is essentially lost. Considering that a 100-word message takes about 70 seconds to transmit, this can be a problem in some cases.
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The developer also says that Chirp currently lacks error correction or redundancy, so the error rate could be high if background noise is too loud or the speaker volume isn't high enough.
The idea of transmitting data via a speaker-microphone is not new, with many similar implementations dating back a decade.
The same idea has also been used as an attack called "MOSQUITO", developed by Israeli researchers in 2018.
Chirp.io , owned by Sonos since 2020, did something similar, facilitating seamless device-to-device communication without traditional wireless connections .
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For those who want to play with the online application of the Chirp tool and are concerned about privacy, its developer said that the application is hosted on GitHub and all operations happen on the client side and are never sent to a server.
Source: bleepingcomputer
