"Alexa, stop spying on me!"
Ke Sun, Chen Chen, Xinyu Zhang
Abstract
Voice assistants (VAs) are becoming highly popular recently as a general means of interacting with the Internet of Things. However, the use of always-on microphones on VAs imposes a looming threat on users' privacy. In this paper, we propose MicShield, the first system that serves as a companion device to enforce privacy preservation on VAs. MicShield introduces a novel selective jamming mechanism, which obfuscates the user's private speech while passing legitimate voice commands to the VAs. It achieves this by using a phoneme level jamming control pipeline. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate that MicShield can effectively protect a user's private speech, without affecting the VA's responsiveness.
Topics & Concepts
EspionageLoomingComputer scienceJammingPrivate speechVoice command deviceComputer securityPipeline (software)The InternetCovertInternet privacySpeech recognitionWorld Wide WebOperating systemThermodynamicsOpticsDevelopmental psychologyPsychologyHistoryPhysicsArchaeologyLinguisticsPhilosophyUser Authentication and Security SystemsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-votingMusic and Audio Processing