Using AI to Attack VA: A Stealthy Spyware Against Voice Assistances in Smart Phones

Abstract

Intelligent Personal Assistant (IA), also known as Voice Assistant (VA), has become increasingly popular as a human-computer interaction mechanism. Most smartphones have built-in voice assistants that are granted high privilege, which is able to access system resources and private information. Thus, once the voice assistants are exploited by attackers, they become the stepping stones for the attackers to hack into the smartphones. Prior work shows that the voice assistant can be activated by inter-component communication mechanism, through an official Android API. However, this attack method is only effective on Google Assistant, which is the official voice assistant developed by Google. Voice assistants in other operating systems, even custom Android systems, cannot be activated by this mechanism. Prior work also shows that the attacking voice commands can be inaudible, but it requires additional instruments to launch the attack, making it unrealistic for real-world attack. We propose an attacking framework, which records the activation voice of the user, and launch the attack by playing the activation voice and attack commands via the built-in speaker. An intelligent stealthy module is designed to decide on the suitable occasion to launch the attack, preventing the attack being noticed by the user. We demonstrate proof-of-concept attacks on Google Assistant, showing the feasibility and stealthiness of the proposed attack scheme. We suggest to revise the activation logic of voice assistant to be resilient to the speaker based attack.

Usability Evaluation of Artificial Intelligence-Based Voice Assistants: The Case of Amazon Alexa

“…The authors in [26] demonstrate how various attacks can be launched on voice-assistants, along with their impact in real-world scenarios. Similar work is done by authors in [27] where they propose a novel attack vector named "Vaspy", which crafts the users' activation voice by silently listening to the users' phone calls. The attack vector is implemented with a proof-of-concept spyware and tested on different voice-assistants.…”

On Transparency and Accountability of Smart Assistants in Smart Cities

“…However, their impact is limited to the cities where these systems operate. Likewise, different works identify security and privacy issues in smart assistants [26,27,50,51]. Nevertheless, previous works on the privacy and security of smart assistants focus on vulnerabilities in their implementation.…”

“…They carried out these attacks remotely by publishing attach skills and stole user data and eavesdropped on their conversations. Zhang et al [51] demonstrated how smart assistants could be exploited to collect user data without their knowledge. They developed a spyware app and disguised it as a popular microphone controller game app.…”

“…Despite their wide-scale use and potential role in smart cities, the number of studies addressing privacy and security issues in smart assistants is small. Most of these studies focus on exploiting the abilities of different smart assistants [24,[49][50][51]. Likewise, other studies motivate to further investigate issues in the privacy controls of smart assistants and explore related risks [26,29,52].…”

Realizing Multi-Access Edge Computing Feasibility: Security Perspective

“…AI based malware detection schemes for smart mobile devices (i.e. UEs) are proposed in [52], [53]. Moreover, AI and machine learning are employed for developing VMI methods [54].…”