Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands • Hacker News Board

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#111

Post by reaperducer » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#112

Post by sillyquiet » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

craftyguy wrote: post #93

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.

Sure, you did (there are always outliers in every group), but for every one of you there are dozens who are buying it as a status symbol.

there are? what's the evidence for that other than a subjective impression of Apple iphone's inferiority and a lack of imagination as to other people's motivations?

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#113

Post by floatrock » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #94

floatrock wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm... the big idea that MP3 figured out was you can document all these "if there is a very loud 4000Hz sound, we can't hear a soft 4005Hz sound near it very well" psychoacoustic phenomena and just throw away all that extra "can't hear it very well" information, resulting in a vastly-smaller filesize that still sounds reasonable (yeah yeah it's not FLAC and the purist needs their gold-plated Monster cables, lets not…

I primarily brought up psychoacoustics as an example of the way we don't hear the way microphones do. While you could abuse them, it would be more obvious. In this case what we're getting is the audio equivalent of adversarial examples; see the link I gave for some visual examples. What's interesting there is that they are basically invisible to us, but surprisingly robust. (As another sort of philosophical sidebar,…

ah, thanks for the clarification! (and the interesting philosophical sidebar!)

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#114

Post by ninguem2 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

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.

Can't you just "machine learn" the attack?

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#115

Post by Normal_gaussian » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:27 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #92

toast0 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Or you could spend $3 and get a kitchen timer that you can slap to start, and beeps when it’s done!

Alexa has named timers, which means you can time multiple things (a common occurrence in cookery).

It is also voice activated, which means it can be done when your hands are full (another common occurrence in cookery).

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#116

Post by TheCoreh » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #105

tomcam wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my iPhone for that

Turn "Hey Siri" off though! Say something like "My firetruck is red" -then- manually activate siri, she was listening the whole time.

WHAAAAT, I'm kinda creeped out

Though it makes sense that it would have a rolling buffer

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#117

Post by shawn » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:32 PM UTC

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.

"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.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#118

Post by asdsa5325 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:37 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #38

Am I the only one that wants a nice cherry mechanical keyboard that transcribes typed commands to inaudible voice commands?

yes, that sounds silly

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#119

Post by LinuxBender » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:38 PM UTC

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #115

chatmasta wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could spend $3 and get a kitchen timer that you can slap to start, and beeps when it’s done!

Alexa has named timers, which means you can time multiple things (a common occurrence in cookery). It is also voice activated, which means it can be done when your hands are full (another common occurrence in cookery).

Perhaps you could connect it to foot peddles, commonly used by guitarists that have their hands full.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#120

Post by tudelo » Thu, May 10, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

freeone3000 wrote: post #74

hedora wrote: post #38

Am I the only one that wants a nice cherry mechanical keyboard that transcribes typed commands to inaudible voice commands?

Why use the voice commands, then? Why not just type?

The only thing I can think of is to either not be heard by others nearby or to mess with people who have these devices. 1 can be done by just typing to something that can actually natively store what you want and 2 is just for fun I guess.