CRII: SaTC: Securing Real-world Speaker Recognition Models against Practical Adversarial Attacks

NSF Award Search · 01002526DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT · $174,728 · view on nsf.gov ↗

Abstract

This project's goal is to assess and improve the safety of real-world speaker recognition models against advanced adversarial attacks. These models are used by voice-controlled devices such as Amazon Echo, Apple Siri, and Google Home that are increasingly integrated into people's lives. However, these models are at risk of being fooled by attackers trying to create requests that imitate legitimate users' voices but issue unauthorized commands. For now, most known attacks are impractical because the adversary needs to be able to make numerous requests to the model before they can create examples that fool it. More effective attacks may exist, however, and the goal of this project is to learn more about them. In particular, it may be possible for attackers with minimal access to, and limited knowledge of, the speaker and the recognition model -- maybe only a single speech sample from the target speaker -- to develop methods for generating adversarial examples with high transferability that can effectively spoof speaker recognition models without requiring any additional queries. The research team will evaluate these vulnerabilities in current commercial voice-controlled systems and propose robust defense mechanisms to build more secure next-generation voice applications. To meet these goals, this project will focus on three core areas. First, the project leverages generative models to develop a Parrot Training attack that uses voice conversion techniques. By generating su

Key facts

NSF award ID
2451168
Awardee
University of Missouri-Kansas City (MO)
SAM.gov UEI
J9CDGR596MN3
PI
Rui Duan
Primary program
01002526DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
All programs
SaTC: Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, CISE Resrch Initiatn Initiatve
Estimated total
$174,728
Funds obligated
$174,728
Transaction type
Standard Grant
Period
10/01/2025 → 09/30/2027