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Imitating people’s speech patterns precisely could bring trouble
- mrec 9y agoSeems to be paywalled.
- jwilk 9y agoArchived copy: https://archive.fo/bxUaX https://archive.fo/bxUaX
- tyingq 9y agoMight be an interesting twist on the somewhat common fraud tactic on submitting bogus invoices via email. Follow up the email with a convincing urgent voice mail from the CEO. "Jim, these guys are personal friends of board member XYZ, can we get them paid ASAP?"
- lolc 9y agoI wonder how common illegal invoice fraud is, because most of these invoice scams are not fraud, legally. They are angling for a contract without claiming that one existed in the first place. When you imitate someone else's voice to validate an invoice you're committing fraud at the very least. Most invoice scammers wouldn't do that because they want to stay on the legal even if scummy side of things.
- tyingq 9y agoHmm. An invoice is usually presented as net term billing for a service or product already delivered.
- lolc 9y agoThere is the "art" of creating an offer that looks like an invoice. I thought that was the most common type of scam. I don't actually know what the ratio is between these scams and actual fraud where a bogus invoice is sent.
- lisper 9y agoI suspect that one of the reasons people have trouble discriminating between these synthetic voices and the real thing is that they have become accustomed to hearing compression artifacts on phone calls, which sound very similar to the stitching artifacts in synthesized voices. For someone like me who grew up talking on analog phones, the synthetic voice sounds pretty obviously synthetic.
- wamatt 9y agoWhat evidence is there to suggest this will always be the case, in light of continual improvements?
- closeparen 9y agoThe cell carrier oligopoly companies are cheap, and would rather use their scarce and immensely valuable resources (bandwidth) to provide new services and open new revenue streams, not boost the quality of existing services which pretty much everyone already pays for.
- lisper 9y agoYeah, this. And also I didn't say it would always be the case, just that it's the case now. (And I'm only even advancing that as a hypothesis.)
- Raphael 9y agoWe'll need Signal to beep after every sentence to indicate that it was signed with the supposed person's key.
- StavrosK 9y agoIt already gives you an error message if the message couldn't be authenticated. That's the whole point of Signal.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?" I couldn't resist.
- jdee 9y agoI've done a lot of work fixing up holes in bank telephone services over the years. I've got evidence of telephone banking customer service reps recording customer's voices and manually piecing together fragments in order to defeat biometric id systems and the like. I've also seen "what is the 3rd letter of your secret word" type voice challenges being pieced together over time to reveal the full secret word. It's inevitable that all these vectors will be automated at some point.
- gregmac 9y agoCan you explain a bit more of this? The service reps are using customers voices to get into what? Is this a targeted attack against specific people? The secret word thing over time sounds even stranger. A single rep would need to take (length of secret word) calls with that customer to get their password. Where are they storing it, and what are they doing with it (that they can't already do using their customer rep-level system access)?
- jdee 9y agoCertainly activity is higher amongst teams that deal with higher wealth individuals, so your question about specific people is broadly correct. To get into what? Bypass biometric ID systems that are common in telephone banking systems. Audio was recorded in high fidelity via smartphones from customers and then manually pieced together in an audio editor and played back down the phone to a biometric system in order to bypass detection. As an adjunct, certain banks in the U.K. have microphones hidden in the counters of physical branches that cross reference your voice with known patterns such is the prevalence of such systems. In regard to secret words, it was a team working within the bank that shared information to crack words. High value CS teams are traditionally very small to keep "the personal touch". CS teams never get access to the full secret word. They get prompted with which questions to ask and what response to expect, so therefore gluing small answers together is the trick.
- literallycancer 9y agoWouldn't all these issues be solved by the customer reading a one time key over the phone?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Chai-T-Rex 9y ago>The volunteers recognised cloned speech as such only half the time (ie, no better than chance). That's incorrect. It's like saying that one lottery ticket has a 50% chance of winning. If they're fooling people half the time, that's way better than chance, since there are so many ways of screwing things up.
- obastani 9y agoI think they are saying the volunteers performed no better than chance, i.e., volunteers are no better at guessing real vs. clone compared to randomly guessing. It's a really good outcome for the clone.
- jcoffland 9y agoWhat is "chance"? In the article they mean no better than flipping a coin. You chose a lottery ticket analogy, but that choice was arbitrary.
- jcoffland 9y agoDoesn't all new technology bring some sort of trouble?
- bitwize 9y agoMy voice is my passport. Verify me.
- WEBSHITWEEKLY 9y agoWEB SHIT WEEKLY AUTHENTICATED!
- anotheryou 9y agoTL;DR: impersonation scams
- mirimir 9y agoOK, now both arbitrary audio/video can be synthesized from samples. So anything remote or recorded can be fake. But hey, that's no worse than text. As Raphael noted, key-based authentication will be needed. Implementation for mass media would be tough, though. In some cases, you'd be limited to authenticating the recorder.
- kakarot 9y agoWhat do you think about the possibility of nonspoofable, imperceptible "signatures" that constantly revolve like OTP, that one could play in the background while they speak to you over the phone? Your device could possibly transparently interpret these signals for you. I think it's worth exploring and that there is business potential.
- mirimir 9y agoThere will be a need for something like that. But maybe it already exists. I'm pretty clueless about smartphones.
- kakarot 9y agoIf it does exist, it is limited to military use afaik. I don't know of any commercial or FOSS platform like that. I was thinking more like a small usb-chargable chip that you carry around that could be used no matter what phone you are from, or to record verifiable messages. The hurdle is creating an algo that can derive all previous signals to verify non-live recordings, but that can't derive the future signals without a private key. I'm not sure what existing bodies of work there are in that domain.
- strathmeyer 9y agoWell I can see an article briefly then it disappears. 2017 we still can't get web content, guess I should go back to gopher.
- cryptarch 9y agouBlock Origin fixed that for me. Link for the lazy: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
- JorgeGT 9y agoIt's because it tries to sell you a subscription but your ad blocker blocks the ad, leaving the content blank. I disabled javascript on the domain and then the article stays.
- Markoff 9y agostrange, worked fine for me in chrome+ublock origin and ajavscript enabled, though i loaded beta version of website automatically
- daodedickinson 9y agoI was surprised this wasn't used to fake a bombshell recording of Trump or Clinton in the last election. It's gonna happen more and more frequently.
- aaron695 9y agoTrue. But don't underestimate the amazing benefits that will come with it. Education and Entertainment will be revolutionized. It will disrupt the world in a huge way as well as create new cyberpunk criminal endeavors.
- zkms 9y agoIt's weird how nobody so far has mentioned using this technology for singing -- given there already are singing voice synthesizers that have had extremely significant cultural impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid
- hatsunearu 9y agoThe way Vocaloid voice banks are created is a highly sophisticated and guided process that involves sampling every phoneme the engine supports at various different pitches. Vocaloid is merely the engine that pieces together phonemes and apply things like vibrato, intonation, and other modulation. Very different tech.
- SFJulie 9y agoIt is weird no computer so called scientists know science. Any detection system are characterized by the fact they will fail at detecting true positive, and tag false negative as true. That is the 101 of science, there is a COST for detection and failure. Biometrics are based on detection hence they can fail according to their sensitivity (false negative) and the cost of cheating (false positive). This analysis vary with progress. AI too are detection systems, they also fail and can be defeated, it is just a question of balancing a cost/benefits analysis with a good budget. Hence criminal organizations and governments will tend to be the firsts one to exploit theses systems because they have larger budgets.
- azinman2 9y agoThis WILL be used with celebrates and politicians in a satirical way, and it'll be awesome. Side note: I've been wanting to do this with my own homebrew Alexa to create "NeNe" (of housewives fame)... a sassier and way funnier assistant.
- Markoff 9y agojust to save your time - tha app from Candyvoice is not available yet