Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant Can Be Controlled By Inaudible Commands (venturebeat.com) 100
Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant were meant to be controlled by live human voices, but all three AI assistants are susceptible to hidden commands undetectable to the human ear, researchers in China and the United States have discovered. From a report: The New York Times reports today that the assistants can be controlled using subsonic commands hidden in radio music, YouTube videos, or even white noise played over speakers, a potentially huge security risk for users. According to the report, the assistants can be made to dial phone numbers, launch websites, make purchases, and access smart home accessories -- such as door locks -- at the same time as human listeners are perceiving anything from completely different spoken text to recordings of music.
In some cases, assistants can be instructed to take pictures or send text messages, receiving commands from up to 25 feet away through a building's open windows. Researchers at Berkeley said that they can modestly alter audio files "to cancel out the sound that the speech recognition system was supposed to hear and replace it with a sound that would be transcribed differently by machines while being nearly undetectable to the human ear."
In some cases, assistants can be instructed to take pictures or send text messages, receiving commands from up to 25 feet away through a building's open windows. Researchers at Berkeley said that they can modestly alter audio files "to cancel out the sound that the speech recognition system was supposed to hear and replace it with a sound that would be transcribed differently by machines while being nearly undetectable to the human ear."
Not news (Score:1)
This is not "news" because it's not "new"
It's been known since September 2017: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ultrasonic-dolphinattack-hack-voice/
Funny how the original research listed only Chinese researchers. Now, NYT attributes this researcher to some Berkley guys, which is highly inaccurate. The DolphinAttack was the sole creation of the Chinese research team.
Re: Not news (Score:3)
Did you read the article on just jump on the fact that prior research in this area negates the latest findings?
The article credits the Chinese teams for their research in 2016. However, this story references new and recently published research applicable to real world attacks using almost any audio source. Security implications of this ongoing research are worrisome.
Alexa add big hairy balls to my shopping list (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder how long before we get inaudiable malware / trolled -- Alexa add big hairy balls to my shopping list! [youtube.com]
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Why add something to the shopping list when you can just place an order?
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+1 Classic!
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of course it does (Score:5, Insightful)
And really most of this stuff is just as bad even if it is audible. It just means one has to figure out when you aren't home before they hold a speaker up to your mail slot / under the door / up to a window.
And how are they going to secure it? Voiceprints -- we already have software that can defeat voiceprinting with a small sample. Passwords? That you have to say aloud everytime you use the device? That's pretty much pointless.
This type of technology is fundamentally broken and from what i can see so far, it cannot be fixed.
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so what? they play audio through my mailbox slot and tell it to play a podcast?
Relevant [xkcd.com].
It works even better when the homeowner isn't aware the order was placed, like in this story.
If you have a listening device in your house that is not hooked up to some form of electronic payment, you are doing better than those with a credit card on file, but still far worse than those without a listening device in their house.
Re:of course it does (Score:5, Insightful)
"so what? they play audio through my mailbox slot and tell it to play a podcast?"
That's about the most innocuous thing you can do.
In the prank category -- you could tell it to play never gonna give you up at full volume at 3am. every day.
Moving up from there... tell it to call everyone on your contact list and hang up, or to text them all weird messages.
Tell it to send a booty call to your crazy ex. Tell it to text a break up message to your girlfriend.
Tell it to unlock your door - i mean amazon sells a door lock now specifically so you can do this with amazon prime. If it catches on this could be pretty big and not some nerdy niche zigbee thing.
Tell it to turn off the heat in the dead of winter while you are on vacation.
Tell it to start your car in the garage. (yeah... this already a thing you can do... fucking brilliant)
Tell it to record your conversations and send them to me.
Tell it to send me your photos.
Tell it to post all your photos to facebook or twitter.
Tell it to forward me your email, or post them all to facebook and twiiter.
Tell it to install new skills / features / apps to do stuff you didn't intend.
Tell it to buy you something from amazon. I hear you can get 1,000 ethernet cables. (Maybe I'm even the seller of such marked up cables.)
Tell it to call 911. (siri at least already does it)
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My 16 year old is a month from his license and my next car will not only not be drive by wire it is going to be manual transmission.
There are automatics out there that don't have a computer. My 1982 300SD has one. Of course, it also doesn't have a lockup torque converter. The only computer involved with the operation of the vehicle at all is the EGR control unit, and that's trivially disabled. The signal from the transmission to the engine is via a cable, and the signal from the engine to the transmission is via vacuum. But at least it's got an overdrive.
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It'll be an old car then. I always have manual transmission cars, but these days every mass produced car has electric steering, braking and throttle, manual or not, have done for years now.
Re:of course it does (Score:4, Interesting)
Some talented screenwriter could probably make a good movie screenplay out of a battle-royale between Siri and Alexa and Okaygoogle all trying to sabotage each other, meanwhile ruining the life of their owner. (And then get the companies to buy the rights so it'll never get shot)
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And even if one doesn't, there's always George Lucas.
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Before the Simpsons?
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Why do I have Pixar in mind? "Toy Story 5 - Electronic Warfare" featuring such lovely side-characters as baking assistant Aunt Alexa, Siri the drama queen and of course the gardener, Google Gnome.
Re: of course it does (Score:1)
Google home mini recognizes individual voices, so private information will stay that way. Wouldn't be surprised if an "only registered voices" option comes around if this becomes too explored
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We already have the technology to synthesize voices using a short sample.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/... [theverge.com]
What are you going to do when your voiceprint is hacked? Get a new voice?
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To be fair, this is about inaudible commands who I doubt have a matching voice print with an existing human voice. Your 'problem' already was a 'problem'.
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To be fair, the very first sentence in this thread:
"And really most of this stuff is just as bad even if it is audible."
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Why would the user need to set it? it seems that there's a known frequency range for all human speech and anything outside of that should be rejected. No user side configuration required.
That said, the article is less clear about this, but I suspect the sounds aren't actually outside of the human voice/hearing range, but rather disguised in other sounds. It's not that you hear silence while your voice assistant hears a command. It's more that you hear music, or white noise, or something else, while it hears
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The most obvious solution is voiceprints, which I'm shocked aren't already widely in use, the technology is decades old at this point.
Don't you know that "There's nothing more useless than a lock with a voiceprint."
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voiceprints won't stop a dedicated attack against a specific person, however they would instantly make all "spam" style attacks useless.
Stopping the vast majority of attacks should not be dismissed simply because it doesn't stop the last few percent. Those should of course be addressed, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
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Voiceprints aren't perfect, but they do a good job of defeating anything that's crafted to blanket a large number of users.
If voiceprints are used, you couldn't for example, simply air a commercial on TV that makes millions of devices order a product.
Basically it's a hugely effective method of blocking spam.
That said, you are correct that it's basically useless against a determined attack on a specific individual, but so are door locks and I don't see people advocating that we should get rid of those.
Securi
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Security does not need to be, nor should it ever be, an all or nothing approach.
100% Agreed.
But the difference between a physical door and an amazon echo is that I absolutely do need a door and I absolutely don't need an amazon echo.
So I absolutely do need a to balance security with effectiveness with convenience with expense... and voila we have various door locks.
I don't need a voice assistant. And the convenience afforded by not having to reach for the remote to pause a movie or to not have to take my phone out of my pocket to dial it doesn't merit the kind of security compromises o
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If you use that logic we would have had no technological progress, ever. No invention ever solved a monumental problem on day one, everything has been incremental improvements to things over time. Nobody thought that we needed to have a computer in our pocket at all times and yet people really enjoy having that at this point,. This message is being composed entirely by voice. Something you say we don't need, and I'll agree we don't need it, that doesn't mean we don't want it, or that it doesn't improve our
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Using your logic, civilization would collapse. GP listed serious problems with a certain technology that aren't currently fixed (even if they're fixable) and decided not to use it. GP said he didn't need voice control, not that he wouldn't want it if it were actually secure.
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His argument was that there was no use case for it, and that it would not be possible to secure it. That's very different from saying they want it to become more secure.
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I didn't say there was no use case for it. I said the use cases were not important, and that the risk/security situation and compromises to use for its use cases don't make any sense.
If, for example, you are paralyzed from the neck down, your situation is quite different, and the added convenience of voice commands to your quality of life makes it worth accepting the security risks. But if you are able bodied its absurd to accept the current security risks in exchange for the relatively trivial conveniences
Bug or Backdoor? (Score:3)
TFA seems to indicate they believe this to be an unexpected and curious flaw in the software, but the fact that this works as well as it does, from up to 25 feet away, is inaudible to humans, and nearly all these PA devices can hear and respond to these types of ostensibly surreptitious commands.. well, maybe I'm paranoid, but maybe they just stumbled onto another NSA backdoor. Or even a Google/Apple/Amazon backdoor.
I find this creepy and suspicious as hell.
Re:Bug or Backdoor? (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA seems to indicate they believe this to be an unexpected and curious flaw in the software, but the fact that this works as well as it does, from up to 25 feet away, is inaudible to humans, and nearly all these PA devices can hear and respond to these types of ostensibly surreptitious commands.. well, maybe I'm paranoid, but maybe they just stumbled onto another NSA backdoor. Or even a Google/Apple/Amazon backdoor.
I find this creepy and suspicious as hell.
No just a result of masquerading corporate spydevices as smart home devices with AI. They are not smart and they are not working for you.
Play it backwards (Score:5, Funny)
Researchers at Berkeley said that they can modestly alter audio files "to cancel out the sound that the speech recognition system was supposed to hear and replace it with a sound that would be transcribed differently by machines while being nearly undetectable to the human ear."
But did these so-called researchers see what Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant do when they play the audio clip backwards? What kind of half-assed research is this?
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Turn me on, dead man.
Anyone know (Score:2)
Anyone know a good tool to play commands to Alexa in an inaudible range? My goals are mostly harmless.
"Alexa Simon Says, Kids go do your homework!"
That kind of thing.
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Sure, it's illegal. But we live in a world with many criminals. You can't assume that the simple fact that an act is illegal will provide you any protection against someone doing it.
Spam is illegal in most places, as are unsolicited phone calls, and yet there are thousands of businesses doing both on a daily basis. Do you trust that those same businesses wouldn't also try running a TV ad or radio spot?
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Just because burglary is illegal doesn't mean you shouldn't have a lock on your front door.
As for the reputable companies we probably don't need to worry about them. It's the disreputable companies that I'm worried about.
They already are controlled by inaudible commands (Score:3)
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If you're aiming for humor I find it fell way short... your silent ethernet packets are aimed at the antenna, not the microphone, which is the subject of TFA.
The phones are susceptible to silent control VIA THE MIKE.
And as for white mice, I, for one, welcome our new Presidential Overlords, Pinky and the Brain. They've *got* to be better than what we've had since 1969!!!
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There's a difference between something that can be done by some large corporations that don't want to scare away customers, and something that can be done by anyone with a little technology from outside if your window is open.
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Am I living in Douglas Adams's reality, where white mice are really running experiments on humans?
Of course not.
They're brown mice. Kind of a chestnut brown. The white mice thing was a ruse so you'd choose the wrong observers.
Does not sound plausible (Score:2)
In voice recognition the first thing you usually do is applying filters to the signal removing anything below 1kHz and above somewhere of 8kHz or 10kHz.
There is no way that there can me a sublime message in infra sound or ultrasonic sound.
How would you actually "interpret it"? You would need a deliberated trojan horse/backdoor to translate a human voice sentence "transmitted" at infra sound into something the machine can interpret as a message, same for ultrasonic sounds. With infra sound you probably would
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Indeed, it is not. The first thing you filter is anything that is not very close to the target signal. Yet the functionality seems to be there. Probably some preparation to have your smartphone or computer talk to them without you hearing it. That is creepy as hell.
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Near as I can tell from the poor explanations given, the sounds aren't actually inaudible, they're simply disguised. It's not that a human hears nothing while the device hears a command, it's that a human hears white noise, or music, or unrelated speech, and the device hears a command.
Considering that computers and humans "hear" in very different ways, it's not really a surprise that you can craft an audio signal that sounds like one thing to a human, and yet sounds like something different to a computer.
Wh
Man breaks into house and steals TV (Score:2)
According to reports a man could be heard yelling the phrase "Alexa open the front door" shortly before the TV was noticed missing.
A suspect was later apprehended with missing TV found in Frunk of his self-driving get away vehicle after it autonomously allided with an inanimate barrier.
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> According to reports a man could be heard yelling the phrase "Alexa
> open the front door" shortly before the TV was noticed missing.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Well, all that depends on a bunch of factors... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi, former technician here.
I've been constructing and building so many robotic, listening devices, radio communication devices that I have enough under the belt to tell you that you don't really need to worry TOO much about all of that, at least not for now, here's why:
1) For this to be at all possible, the devices involved must meet a range of technical specifications and capabilities. For example, you have a mobile speaker that is specced to work within 20 hz to 20KHz, most of these will fail above 10KHz anyway, and you don't need them to be better than that, for its purpose, headphones however - is an entirely different case.
2) I've tested numerous microphones so small we're talking 2-3 mm size, and most of these failed to pick up frequencies above 20KHz. As a young person, you could potentially hear up to 24KHz (I could pick up 23KHz sounds when I was 18 and worked in an electronics store, we tested with a Function Generator and a Piezo speaker specced well above 28KHz). Today I can pick up around 16.5-17KHz, which is not bad for my age, but on the plus side, I don't need expensive headphones anymore.
3) We're talking inaudible sounds to the human ears here, therefor we're above the 20KHz range, to be entirely safe - we should be above 25KHz for this, very few phones, televisions, computer speakers and whatnot are capable of vibrating or picking up vibrations at those speeds, therefor this kind of communication in that frequency spectrum would fail drastically.
What you COULD do tho, is that you use the upper audible frequency spectrum of say just above 10KHz and mix it with existing sounds, time it correctly with proper known synchronization (remember the old modems and their sounds? Now imagine a much higher pitch) - and albeit quite slow, it would still be possible to use it to trigger commands, communicate short messages etc. Anything needing more bandwidth than this would be impractical. You wouldn't hear this, albeit the sound technically would be possible to pick up if it was too long, but if just a split second there, in sequence not spaced too close, you'd be able to get away with it, possibly disguised by music or voice, but you'd still need some form of "trigger" sequence to pick it up and start reading, otherwise you'd get timing errors. Kinda like "fast morsecode" if you like.
If you're worried about eavesdropping, you should be far more concerned with your home's windows - those are like giant eardrums, and light hitting those will create a small vibration of the reflected light, this tech has been known for years, you just don't hear about it very often.
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I think your missing the real attack. It doesn't seem like things are inaudible, but more that they're disguised as other sounds. Being that computers and humans "hear" very differently, it's not really a surprise that you can craft a sound that would sound like one thing to a computer, but something else to a human listener.
Something trivially solved with voiceprints, a several decade old technology.
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Something trivially solved with voiceprints, a several decade old technology.
Very true.
Another thing I was playing with here the other day, was the ability to use the phones ever increasing high resolution cameras as listening devices, when the phones are left on the table, or perhaps in a charging docking station, cameras (or a small addressable area of interest) could be used to record vibration of surrounding objects which can in turn be modulated into sound.
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You don't have to voice print every phrase only the wake up word.
Cut power to the microphones (Score:1)
The only thing that will disable this is cutting power to the internal microphone. Windows themselves are one of the ways we used to "hear" conversations, typing (which can also be picked up by your cellphone and any device with a microphone, as well as nearby vibration sensors in your cellphone).
Even inaudible humming frequently can be translated.
Just don't install devices in your tin foil shielded and sound baffled escape room, and make sure it's not just airgapped but it's also without fans.
(thinks about
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So potentially malicious actors could stand outside my door with speakers and get my Alexa to...do what, exactly? Play my Spotify playlist? If they're already on my property blasting speakers at me, shouldn't I worry more that they might steal something?
This is a panic over nonsense.
You may laugh now, but when Russia starts paying for ads that makes Alexa tell you to vote for Kanye West, and you do, and he becomes president, you won't be laughing any more.
User Account Permissions (Score:3)
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Siri, set (Score:1)
Can you hear me now? (Score:2)
My Pixel 2 can't even hear me when it's in my pocket, so I'm not overly concerned
The problem with open microphones (Score:2)