Evaluating Synthetic Command Attacks on Smart Voice Assistants

Abstract: Recent advances in voice synthesis, coupled with the ease with which speech can be harvested for millions of people, introduce new threats to applications that are enabled by devices such as voice assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Google Home etc.). We explore if unrelated and limited amount of speech from a target can be used to synthesize commands for a voice assistant like Amazon Alexa. More specifically, we investigate attacks on voice assistants with synthetic commands when they match command sources to authorized users, and applications (e.g., Alexa Skills) process commands only when their source is an authorized user with a chosen confidence level. We demonstrate that even simple concatenative speech synthesis can be used by an attacker to command voice assistants to perform sensitive operations. We also show that such attacks, when launched by exploiting compromised devices in the vicinity of voice assistants, can have relatively small host and network footprint. Our results demonstrate the need for better defenses against synthetic malicious commands that could target voice assistants.