Stefan Mileschin

A spy in your house

For two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.

According to SFGate,the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites.

This means that the spooks could use the tech to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online or listen in.

A group of students from University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.

Some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that said that they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text. So while a human listener hears someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon’s Echo speaker might hear an instruction to add something to your shopping list.

Nicholas Carlini, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in computer security at UC Berkeley and one of the paper’s authors, said that there was no evidence that the techniques have left the lab, it may only be a matter of time before someone starts exploiting them.

The researchers are exploiting the gap between human and machine speech recognition. Speech recognition systems typically translate each sound to a letter, eventually compiling those into words and phrases. By making slight changes to audio files, researchers were able to cancel out the sound that the speech recognition system was supposed to hear and replace it with a sound that would be transcribed differently by machines while being nearly undetectable to the human ear.
https://fudzilla.com/news/ai/46274-c...-ai-assistants