Researchers are warning that with a few minutes of your recorded voice, attackers can use voice morphing for imitation attacks that can trick machine and human authentication systems.

Susoni

It's easy for someone with potentially malicious intentions to record your voice, as you leave traces of your voice when simply talking somewhere out in public, during mobile phone calls, in videos posted on social networking sites, or even when sending a recorded voice greeting card. Your voice is considered to be unique enough to serve as an authentication of your identity.

But after studying the implications of commonplace voice leakage and developing voice impersonation attacks, researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham warned that an attacker, in possession of only a very limited number of your voice samples, with "just a few minutes worth of audio of a victim's voice," can clone your voice and could compromise your security, safety, and privacy.

Nitesh Saxena, Ph.D., the director of the Security and Privacy In Emerging computing and networking Systems (SPIES) lab and the associate professor of computer and information sciences at UAB, kindly supplied me with a copy of his report, "All Your Voices Are Belong to Us: Stealing Voices to Fool Humans and Machines." The research was presented at the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security.

"Because people rely on the use of their voices all the time, it becomes a comfortable practice," explained Saxena. "What they may not realize is that level of comfort lends itself to making the voice a vulnerable commodity. People often leave traces of their voices in many different scenarios. They may talk out loud while socializing in restaurants, giving public presentations or making phone calls, or leave voice samples online."

Using an off-the-shelf voice morphing tool, researchers Dibya Mukhopadhyay, Maliheh Shirvanian, and Saxena discovered that an "attacker can build a very close model of a victim's voice after learning only a very limited number of samples in the victim's voice (e.g., mined through the Internet, or recorded via physical proximity). Specifically, the attacker uses voice morphing techniques to transform its voice – speaking any arbitrary message – into the victim's voice."

"As a result, just a few minutes' worth of audio in a victim's voice would lead to the cloning of the victim's voice itself," Saxena said. "The consequences of such a clone can be grave. Because voice is a characteristic unique to each person, it forms the basis of the authentication of the person, giving the attacker the keys to that person's privacy."