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Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

nytimes.com

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Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#121

Post by dragonwriter »

reaperducer wrote: post #111
Shivetya wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for me it kills all desire to have a voice assistant. I am already in the camp of taping over the camera's in my computers now will I need to worry about the microphone or what comes from the speakers? so the question is, shouldn't they be able to detect the wavelength of what they are processing to weed out some of the more obvious tricks? with voice recognition could it also not be limited to a voice it is trained…

> could it also not be limited to a voice it is trained to know? iPhones already do this. My wife's iPhone won't respond to me, and vice versa. Though I don't know if this is enough to mitigate the attack mentioned in TFA.

The article notes that both Amazon and Google speaker-based assistants do this for sensitive operations (Google Assistant on Android does it for everything.) A hidden command that can't mimic your voice could, say, play media with Google Home, but wouldn't have full access.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#123

Post by Normal_gaussian »

toast0 wrote: post #88
mkirklions wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to get rid of my alexa, but my wife uses it as a kitchen timer. We literally dont use it for anything else. Might get one of those philips light sets since our living room is weird... Tbh, id rather not use alexa..

The clock / timer functions of Alexa/Google Home are super useful, but nothing else seems compelling to me. Someone could clearly make an offline device that did voice recognition clock and timer, but does anyone?

With the echo/Alexa, I use timers, clock, alarms (morning), control Spotify, and call my mother and grandparents.

The last is the most important for me; I live hundreds of mile from both, and the key is that the echo is a super easy device for them to use.

I can send a chatty audio message telling them I'm looking to call, or asking a question, which is asynchronous in nature, and when they are ready they can call or message me.

It is conference calling by default. Which is great for family stuff, they wouldn't meet my girlfriend otherwise.

I got them the echo show (I have the normal echo) and it is fabulous. Video calling with no effort. I use my phone to do video on my side.

For this, the echo is worth every damn penny and then some.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#124

Post by sideshowb »

shawn wrote: post #117
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes WAY more sense than a range outside of human hearing that OP implicated ("inaudible"). Expecting TV's to play tones outside the range people can hear is ridiculous.

"Inaudible" doesn't necessarily mean a range outside of human hearing. For example you could embed a 6kHz tone in a way that's inaudible to humans due to the other frequencies in the waveform.

And promptly lose it to lossy compression

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#125

Post by majormajor »

mkirklions wrote: post #76
sillyquiet wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people keep repeating this tired and offensive myth? I bought my iphone for the hardware and software capabilities that I judged to be the best for my use cases. And I am not the only one that actually had a non-trite reason, I am sure.

Is this a myth? What does apple have better than android in 2018?

Their face unlock is better than anything I saw on my Pixel or my Windows Hello laptop. To the point of being usable and preferred over fingerprints instead of a pointless extra.

I switched back because of that + Google Assistant's unwillingness to work without Google tracking my location history constantly (assuming that the "off" switch there even actually stops them).

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#129

Post by jimrandomh »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #102
adambowles wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, the adverts omit a certain frequency range from the assistant's invocation phrase which human's won't notice is missing Edit: Yep, omit / reduce tones in the 3000 - 6000 Hz range https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/5oer2u/i_may_ha...

Which makes WAY more sense than a range outside of human hearing that OP implicated ("inaudible"). Expecting TV's to play tones outside the range people can hear is ridiculous.

TV channels already contain inaudible-sound identifiers. Nielsen has people put listeners in their homes, and uses the identifiers to track which channels are getting played.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#130

Post by saagarjha »

lozenge wrote: post #90
Jun8 wrote: post #6

The interesting thing is that Google Assistant has teh same problem, it's right there in the subtitle. It's interesting that it was omitted from the main title. Rather than journalistic oversight I think this verifies what people have commented many times: that the fact that GA does not have a personalized name makes it to refer to it. SO much so that a very distant third product is included rather than GA.

Usually the attack requires the source code (or weightings of the neural network), I'd be surprised if they are able to actually attack these systems.

Does it really? As far as I was aware, it is still possible to perform a black box attack without knowing the weights of a network. Using specially crafted input, it's even possible to "steal" weights from a network!
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