HackerPapers

arXiv:1708.09537cs.CR

DolphinAtack: Inaudible Voice Commands

Guoming Zhang, Chen Yan, Xiaoyu Ji, Taimin Zhang, Tianchen Zhang, Wenyuan Xu

Abstract

Speech recognition (SR) systems such as Siri or Google Now have become an increasingly popular human-computer interaction method, and have turned various systems into voice controllable systems(VCS). Prior work on attacking VCS shows that the hidden voice commands that are incomprehensible to people can control the systems. Hidden voice commands, though hidden, are nonetheless audible. In this work, we design a completely inaudible attack, DolphinAttack, that modulates voice commands on ultrasonic carriers (e.g., f > 20 kHz) to achieve inaudibility. By leveraging the nonlinearity of the microphone circuits, the modulated low frequency audio commands can be successfully demodulated, recovered, and more importantly interpreted by the speech recognition systems. We validate DolphinAttack on popular speech recognition systems, including Siri, Google Now, Samsung S Voice, Huawei HiVoice, Cortana and Alexa. By injecting a sequence of inaudible voice commands, we show a few proof-of-concept attacks, which include activating Siri to initiate a FaceTime call on iPhone, activating Google Now to switch the phone to the airplane mode, and even manipulating the navigation system in an Audi automobile. We propose hardware and software defense solutions. We validate that it is feasible to detect DolphinAttack by classifying the audios using supported vector machine (SVM), and suggest to re-design voice controllable systems to be resilient to inaudible voice command attacks.

arXiv comments
15 pages, 17 figures
Journal reference
published on ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2017
DOI
doi:10.1145/3133956.3134052
Subjects
cs.CRCryptography and Security

On Hacker News

Linked by 8 identifiable commenters in 9 comments across 7 threads, from Sep 2017 to Feb 2020. Found in 2 HN submissions from Sep 2017 to Sep 2017. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments7 threads

  1. Activate this ‘bracelet of silence,’ and Alexa can’t eavesdrop 2 comments

    • Filter won’t necessarily help. It’s possible to use ultra sonic for amplitude modulation signal to affect the non linearity of a microphone itself. [0] Although it does require knowing what the underlying natural sound to be modulated is (some processing required). Robustness to…

      dijksterhuisView on HNParent context

    • Dolphin Attack used ultrasonic amplitude modulation against a variety of devices with some success [0]. Page 9 for the results table. I believe they were taking advantage of the non linearity of microphones. 0: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf

      dijksterhuisView on HNParent context

  2. SurfingAttack: attack on voice assistants using ultrasonic guided wave 1 comment
  3. Hard disks can be turned into listening devices 1 comment

    • The inaudible range is far more likely to used as an attack vector for nefarious purposes. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/there...

      johnnycabView on HNParent context

  4. Designing an audio adblocker 1 comment

    • Completely agree. I use multiple ad- and tracker-blocking browser extensions, but mostly due to the tracking. Incidentally, while blocking ads online can be noticed by the serving party (to e.g. display an annoying warning) those behind the goods/services being verbally…

      _underfl0w_View on HNParent context

  5. Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People 1 comment
  6. Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands 1 comment

    • That's clever but that's so many dB down with any sane anti-aliasing filter that it would require quite the sound source. Based on flipping through the pages of the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf), it looks like they're taking advantage of the non-linearity in the…

      cozzydView on HNParent context

  7. South Park Season Premier Sets Off Everyone's Amazon Echo 2 comments

    • Check out DolphinAttack Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21HjF4A3WE4 Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf

      satysinView on HNParent context

    • In case anyone missed it, the commands don't have to be audible: From https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf > DolphinAttack ... modulates voice commands on ultrasonic carriers ... to achieve inaudibility. By leveraging the nonlinearity of the microphone circuits the modulated ...…

      nomelView on HNParent context

Submitted to Hacker News

Connected through shared HN threads, not inferred similarity or a recommendation.