CommanderGabble: A Universal Attack Against ASR Systems Leveraging Fast Speech

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are widely used in various online transcription services and personal digital assistants. Emerging lines of research have demonstrated that ASR systems are vulnerable to hidden voice commands, i.e., audio that can be recognized by ASRs but not by humans. Such attacks, however, often either highly depend on white-box knowledge of a specific machine learning model or require special hardware to construct the adversarial audio. This paper proposes a new model-agnostic and easily-constructed attack, called CommanderGabble, which uses fast speech to camouflage voice commands. Both humans and ASR systems often misinterpret fast speech, and such misinterpretation can be exploited to launch hidden voice command attacks. Specifically, by carefully manipulating the phonetic structure of a target voice command, ASRs can be caused to derive a hidden meaning from the manipulated, high-speed version. We implement the discovered attacks both over-the-wire and over-the-air, and conduct a suite of experiments to demonstrate their efficacy against 7 practical ASR systems. Our experimental results show that the over-the-wire attacks can disguise as many as 96 out of 100 tested voice commands into adversarial ones, and that the over-the-air attacks are consistently successful for all 18 chosen commands in multiple real-world scenarios.