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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

#151

Post by Retra »

Shivetya wrote: post #25
bsenftner wrote: post #11

Hidden audio is simply too easy. Hidden audio is the knife that kills desire for any financial services access through a voice assistant - for those smart enough to not follow the horde.

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…

If someone (or something) is watching me through my laptop camera, then they are going to get a very boring show that cannot possibly be an efficient use of their available time and risk.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#152

Post by taneq »

buro9 wrote: post #132
jimrandomh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Er... holy shit to the thought that (Alexa|Assistant|Siri) + Neilsen (or just by Google) could monitor advert viewing in millions of homes.

I thought a few apps had been discovered over the years that fingerprinted TV ads played near the phone and reported them?

https://www.howtogeek.com/338409/hundreds-of-smartphone-apps...

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#154

Post by srtjstjsj »

danShumway wrote: post #153

> This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further Pet peeve, I really wish that this was a link. Was I just blind? Is the actual paper linked anywhere in the article?

It's obliquely linked at "More recently, Mr. Carlini and his colleagues at Berkeley have [LINK: incorporated commands] into audio recognized by Mozilla’s DeepSpeech voice-to-text translation software, an open-source platform." https://nicholas.carlini.com/code/audio_adversarial_examples...

It's probably this paper: https://nicholas.carlini.com/papers/2018_dls_audioadvex.pdf

discussed in January when it went up on Arxiv: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16220376

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#155

Post by hammock »

hunter2_ wrote: post #19
banku_brougham wrote: post #13

Serious off-topic question: Are there docs for Siri so that i can learn what it can/can’t do? I have tried skipping songs, playing a genre, set random play, and similar in iTunes — generally a failure, often initiates an unwanted phone call. On the phone I can successfully call the intended contact about 50% of the time, possibly because I have ~250 contacts. I suspect that if i knew the right words to interact with…

This doesn't address your question but might be interesting. As someone who has used Android forever and never tried Siri, those anecdotes are mind blowing to me. For me with Google Assistant, media commands work about 80% and successful call initiation is about 90%. And I haven't looked for documentation either. YMMV of course.

https://assistant.google.com/explore

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#156

Post by srtjstjsj »

saagarjha wrote: post #130
lozenge wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity16/technical...

"We evaluate these attacks under two different threat models. In the black-box model, an attacker uses the speech recognition system as an opaque oracle. We show that the adversary can produce difficult to understand commands that are effective against existing systems in the black-box model.

Under the white-box model, the attacker has full knowledge of the internals of the speech recognition system and uses it to create attack commands that we demonstrate through user testing are not understandable by humans."

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#157

Post by srtjstjsj »

osteele wrote: post #138
GW150914 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the title I used, it must have been changed: “Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t.” I couldn’t have added the subtitle because as you say, it would have been too long.

"Alexa, Siri, and Google Home, can hear inaudible commands" "Alexa, Siri, and Google Home, can hear commands that humans can't"

That's less clickbaity than "This Hidden Command" and "You can't." that are specifically designed to hack your psychology and make you feel uncomfortable and threatened by not knowing what they are referring to.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#158

Post by dirkgently »

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.

And ".... hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant."

And then "digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri are set to outnumber people by 2021".

Why is Google mentioned in one context but not other?

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#159

Post by dirkgently »

rootusrootus wrote: post #37
hunter2_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't address your question but might be interesting. As someone who has used Android forever and never tried Siri, those anecdotes are mind blowing to me. For me with Google Assistant, media commands work about 80% and successful call initiation is about 90%. And I haven't looked for documentation either. YMMV of course.

Sometimes it works great. Sometimes I can't get Siri to do anything right. Anecdotally I've found that Google's voice assistant is quite a lot better. Unfortunately I am unwilling to accept the rest of Google's terms and conditions so I am stuck with Siri for the foreseeable future.

And what are those specific "terms and conditions"?

It's funny hoe Google is somehow perceived as evil while Apple or Amazon not.

If I have to trust someone with mt data (and we all do), I will choose Google over anyone else.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#160

Post by danShumway »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #154
danShumway wrote: post #153

> This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further Pet peeve, I really wish that this was a link. Was I just blind? Is the actual paper linked anywhere in the article?

It's obliquely linked at "More recently, Mr. Carlini and his colleagues at Berkeley have [LINK: incorporated commands] into audio recognized by Mozilla’s DeepSpeech voice-to-text translation software, an open-source platform." https://nicholas.carlini.com/code/audio_adversarial_examples... It's probably this paper: https://nicholas.carlini.com/papers/2018_dls_audioadvex.pdf discussed in January when it went up on Arx…

Thanks, I guess I was just blind :)
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