Related papers: SkillFence: A Systems Approach to Practically Miti…

Recent advances in voice synthesis, coupled with the ease with which speech can be harvested for millions of people, introduce new threats to applications that are enabled by devices such as voice assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Google Home…

The home voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa have become increasingly popular due to many interesting voice-activated services provided through special applications called skills. These skills, though useful, have also introduced new…

Third-party software, or skills, are essential components in Smart Personal Assistants (SPA). The number of skills has grown rapidly, dominated by a changing environment that has no clear business model. Skills can access personal…

Many households include children who use voice personal assistants (VPA) such as Amazon Alexa. Children benefit from the rich functionalities of VPAs and third-party apps but are also exposed to new risks in the VPA ecosystem. In this…

Since being launched in 2014, Alexa, Amazon's versatile cloud-based voice service, is now active in over 100 million households worldwide. Alexa's user-friendly, personalized vocal experience offers customers a more natural way of…

Virtual personal assistants (VPA) (e.g., Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant) today mostly rely on the voice channel to communicate with their users, which however is known to be vulnerable, lacking proper authentication. The rapid growth of…

The Amazon Alexa marketplace is the largest Voice Personal Assistant (VPA) platform with over 100,000 voice applications (i.e., skills) published to the skills store. In an effort to maintain the quality and trustworthiness of voice-apps,…

Many Internet of Things (IoT) devices have voice user interfaces (VUIs). One of the most popular VUIs is Amazon's Alexa, which supports more than 47,000 third-party applications ("skills"). We study how Alexa's integration of these skills…

The radical advances in telecommunications and computer science have enabled a myriad of applications and novel seamless interaction with computing interfaces. Voice Assistants (VAs) have become a norm for smartphones, and millions of VAs…

This paper explores the application of artificial intelligence techniques in audio and voice processing, focusing on the integration of wake words and speaker recognition for secure access in embedded systems. With the growing prevalence of…

The popularity of smart-home assistant systems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home leads to a booming third-party application market (over 70,000 applications across the two stores). While existing works have revealed security issues in…

Home Digital Voice Assistants (HDVAs) are getting popular in recent years. Users can control smart devices and get living assistance through those HDVAs (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Google Home) using voice. In this work, we study the insecurity of…

Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…

In this study, we investigate the emerging threat of inaudible acoustic attacks targeting digital voice assistants, a critical concern given their projected prevalence to exceed the global population by 2024. Our research extends the…

This paper presents the design of the machine learning architecture that underlies the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) a large scale Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables developers to extend the…

Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for…

This paper presents a novel attack on voice-controlled digital assistants using nonsensical word sequences. We present the results of experimental work which demonstrates that it is possible for malicious actors to gain covert access to a…

Autonomous vehicles (AVs), equipped with numerous sensors such as camera, LiDAR, radar, and ultrasonic sensor, are revolutionizing the transportation industry. These sensors are expected to sense reliable information from a physical…

Due to the open nature of voice input, voice assistant (VA) systems (e.g., Google Home and Amazon Alexa) are under a high risk of sensitive information leakage (e.g., personal schedules and shopping accounts). Though the existing VA systems…

With recent advances in autonomous driving, Voice Control Systems have become increasingly adopted as human-vehicle interaction methods. This technology enables drivers to use voice commands to control the vehicle and will be soon available…