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Researchers have learned to send inaudible commands embedded in white noise, music, or even completely different speech, that can fool the ubiquitous voice-recognition phone-home spy devices that are all the rage lately. Inaudible to you, but indelible commands for the devices.
Per The New York Times:
Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio.
Nicholas Carlini, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in computer security at U.C. Berkeley...and his colleagues at Berkeley have incorporated commands into audio recognized by Mozilla's DeepSpeech voice-to-text translation software, an open-source platform. They were able to hide the command, "O.K. Google, browse to evil.com" in a recording of the spoken phrase, "Without the data set, the article is useless." Humans cannot discern the command. The Berkeley group also embedded the command in music files, including a four-second clip from Verdi's "Requiem."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @03:10PM (1 child)
Why would these devices be built with microphones that work in the ultrasonic range? While I'm not very likely to ever have one (I'm in the over-60 generation), if I did, it probably wouldn't be very hard to add a low pass filter to the mic, so that it didn't respond to any frequencies beyond my hearing...
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday May 13 2018, @08:11PM
"Ultrasound" snuck into the title, but TFS actually doesn't use that word.
They use words like embedded and hidden and undetectable. Which doesn't necessarily mean you can't hear it.
Remember the mosquito ring tone? Old farts couldn't hear that, but the speakers in the phones had no trouble playing it. Kids could hear it. Doesn't have to be ultrasound to be undetectable. Half an octave above your hearing is good enough.
The smaller the mic the higher the frequency it is likely to pick up. Even those tones above human hearing. Not because they WANTED those tones when they designed it, but simply they didn't explicitly build in a filter to exclude them, because it wasn't necessary. Music encoding (packetiziation) would remove it. It wouldn't travel across the net.
But some, or all, of voice recognition works on the phone. It gets the raw sound.
Try this: Do what ever you have to do to get your phone into voice input mode.
(You don't have to use Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa or Google's Assistant - simply the voice input feature of your keyboard.)
Then softly whisper "What time is it?"
I'm betting you see the text fill in just fine, even with a fan running in the window, or the tv on in the background.
Yet the person across the room won't hear it. Imagine if you could whisper just barely above human hearing...
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.