In plain words: Hidden voice commands are woven into ordinary songs so a phone's speech recognizer hears them while people just hear music. The trick works automatically on real speech-recognition apps played through the air with background noise, and such songs can spread online or on radio.
Abstract · CommanderSong: A Systematic Approach for Practical Adversarial Voice Recognition
The popularity of ASR (automatic speech recognition) systems, like Google Voice, Cortana, brings in security concerns, as demonstrated by recent attacks. The impacts of such threats, however, are less clear, since they are either less stealthy (producing noise-like voice commands) or requiring the physical presence of an attack device (using ultrasound). In this paper, we demonstrate that not only are more practical and surreptitious attacks feasible but they can even be automatically constructed. Specifically, we find that the voice commands can be stealthily embedded into songs, which, when played, can effectively control the target system through ASR without being noticed. For this purpose, we developed novel techniques that address a key technical challenge: integrating the commands into a song in a way that can be effectively recognized by ASR through the air, in the presence of background noise, while not being detected by a human listener. Our research shows that this can be done automatically against real world ASR applications. We also demonstrate that such CommanderSongs can be spread through Internet (e.g., YouTube) and radio, potentially affecting millions of ASR users. We further present a new mitigation technique that controls this threat.
Xuejing Yuan, Yuxuan Chen, Yue Zhao, Yunhui Long, Xiaokang Liu, Kai Chen, Shengzhi Zhang, Heqing Huang, Xiaofeng Wang, Carl A. Gunter
arXiv:1801.08535 · cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.AS · submitted Jan 24, 2018 · updated Jul 2, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by USENIX Security 2018