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Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

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Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#101

Post by mrguyorama »

jedberg wrote: post #89
ModernMech wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies if this comes across as too "get off my lawn", but I come from a time when to look something up, you had to haul yourself to the library; open one of dozens of drawers filled with index cards; find the card your looking for, which directed you to a stack in the library; find the book on the stack; and finally find the page in the book by consulting an index. It's a lost art. Then, you would have to go to an…

I too grew up in the time of card catalogs. And I learned a lot from reading through the other encyclopedia entries as I flipped the pages looking for the page with the info. Yes, you're right, the voice interface is not the astronomical leap that the cellphone was. But why is that your cutoff line? My voice assistants offer a lot of benefit to me. Especially with kids, I don't always have a free hand to pull out the…

My personal experience is that simply typing my query into a search engine or pressing the spotify logo to start my music requires less effort or fuss than attempting to figure out how I'm supposed to word my desire for the benevolent overseer to do what I want.

IE, using voice commands is a downgrade IMO. Voice commands are not directly discoverable, and there's a lot more magic boxes.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#102

Post by falcolas »

bussierem wrote: post #75
heinrichhartman wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (they aren’t) How do you know? And, how do you know they will not do this silently in the future? Also worse detection does not mean more false positives. Usually, you can get the false positive rate very low by allowing more false negatives. In this way you have a choice, how you want to trade-off. Without this device, you are stuck with the choice that Amazon/Google make for you.

> How do you know? And, how do you know they will not do this silently in the future? Because it's a literal hardware limitation. The device is built in a way that requires a wake word before any recording can possibly happen, thanks to it being built with 2 separate control boards. If they ended up maybe changing the wakeword to "the", then maybe they could "silently" listen to everything, but that would be caught p…

How about the issue where Google’s devices were errantly recording everything due to a hardware issue - where the button override for the voice activation was stuck in the activated position.

People who think that there’s no way that Google and Amazon could be recording everything need to realize that this is also not true. Most of these “limitations” are software enforced, and that software is updated constantly.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#103

Post by StavrosK »

michaelmior wrote: post #97
StavrosK wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except now you can audit the software and not connect it to the network at all.

Good point if I set up the Pi myself, but it's unclear if this will apply to the device if it gets produced commercially.

Even if it gets produced commercially, no network access means no problem.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#104

Post by guelo »

wrs wrote: post #55

While I appreciate the sentiment...unless you actually think Google and Amazon devices are recording irrelevant ambient sound deliberately (they aren’t), this doesn’t help anything. Unless the software here is better than theirs at recognizing the trigger word (very unlikely), there will be even more false positive activations on this device than there are on the originals. Edit: It’s very unlikely because Amazon and…

From a non-privacy perspective this adds the feature of being able to customize your wake word, which besides being a nice feature on its own also counters Google and Amazon's desire to inject their brands deeper into our psyche by making us say them out loud.

From a privacy perspective, having user control of the wake word prevents Google and Amazon from adding future wake words that could be abused for other ways to track us. For example, Google might get the bright idea to track TV ads by listening for audio in the ads. Or tracking people in your house by making Android phones emmit non-audible chirps. These kind of "features" could be easily introduced at any point in the future by an update to privacy policies that nobody notices.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#105

Post by Arelius »

bussierem wrote: post #75
heinrichhartman wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (they aren’t) How do you know? And, how do you know they will not do this silently in the future? Also worse detection does not mean more false positives. Usually, you can get the false positive rate very low by allowing more false negatives. In this way you have a choice, how you want to trade-off. Without this device, you are stuck with the choice that Amazon/Google make for you.

> How do you know? And, how do you know they will not do this silently in the future? Because it's a literal hardware limitation. The device is built in a way that requires a wake word before any recording can possibly happen, thanks to it being built with 2 separate control boards. If they ended up maybe changing the wakeword to "the", then maybe they could "silently" listen to everything, but that would be caught p…

Citation strongly needed.

I do understand that the wake word processing happens in a special kernel in a low power state, however....

The wake word is a trained kernel, it can be trained to listen for a huge set of things (as seen in the Pixel's passive song detection), so they would just train the kernel to detect a large targeted (marketing?) vocab.

about being "lit up" constantly? I'm not saying you are wrong, but I'd really like to see a citation that this is true. Is it true for both echo and home?

And while Packet Sniffing can disprove that it's listening and sending whole audio to the cloud, it can't disprove that it's listening for a huge set of "wake words" and toggling bits in other control messages to track users in more subtle ways.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#106

Post by amdavidson »

lftl wrote: post #8

I love this idea. I've wanted to do something similar for a long time, but I was thinking about building a home assistant where the always-on mic was a complete separate board that only listened for wake words and had no internet access. The main mic would only be powered on when the smaller board woke it up. Alias achieves the same thing in a much simpler way to where I might actually consider buying a home assistan…

How is this different than an actual echo device as it sits now?

You're still relying on a piece of software to make the wake-word assessment and hand off the audio to the cloud. Now you're just adding more hardware parts to fail.

If your argument is that you trust your software more than Amazon's, then you shouldn't need anything more than a single microphone anyways because why would you surveil yourself?

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#107

Post by Arelius »

stronglikedan wrote: post #100
bussierem wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know? And, how do you know they will not do this silently in the future? Because it's a literal hardware limitation. The device is built in a way that requires a wake word before any recording can possibly happen, thanks to it being built with 2 separate control boards. If they ended up maybe changing the wakeword to "the", then maybe they could "silently" listen to everything, but that would be caught p…

> Packet sniffing and hardware inspection both instantly disprove... I'm under the impression that packet sniffing is useless with end-to-end encryption, but I could be wrong. I.e., you can tell that something is being sent, but you can't know what.

The theory is that we can still estimate how much data goes over the network. So if it were sending all audio to the cloud, we'd see.

It does however not exclude other information, like sending keyword flags, or storing audio fragments to send along with other messages later on.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#108

Post by amdavidson »

mLuby wrote: post #30
ape4 wrote: post #27

Do Alex and Google have software APIs? Can you make a hardware device (eg Raspberry Pi) that listens for a wake up then sends to the API? Seems more elegant. As a bonus, maybe your device could understand "Alexa..." and "OK Google..." and send to the relevant API. Use Alexa for shopping and Google for searches?

Involves more trust. This has the elegance of not needing to trust the megacorps any more than you care to.

How does this involve more trust?

With either Alias, or an homebrew solution you're sending the query portion ("How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?") to the megacorp?

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#109

Post by perfmode »

Someone1234 wrote: post #53
ninju wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The microphone on the Alexa needs to be constantly active so that it can hear its name (the trigger name). The point of this device is to defeat the microphone, by playing white noise. But yes this device does not address what data is captured after you have engaged your smart assistant (nor is trying to address that issue)

The processing for the wake word is handling on the firmware. If you point Wireshark (or another network monitor) at a Google Home or Alexa device you can see that there isn't significant network activity while idle.

If I wanted to be nefarious I would utilize an on-device cache and batch The unauthorized audio with the authorized audio emissions to hide them

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#110

Post by Arelius »

ttul wrote: post #57
lotu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is correct! Google, Amazon, and Apple despite having vast resources don't have the ability/desire to pay for the bandwidth, storage, and processing needed to have 24/7 recording and analysis from every smart device, especially when you realize that includes cell phones. Also it is ironic because all modern cellphones have the whole smart speaker thing built into them but people aren't freaking out about that in…

This is similar to the issue of people being scared of radiation from cell towers but somehow not freaking out that they have a transmitter in their pocket that uses the same range of frequencies but at vastly higher power (due to the proximity).

I know a few people who only talk via wired headset for this reason.
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