Robust Detection of Machine-induced Audio Attacks in Intelligent Audio Systems with Microphone Array

Abstract

With the popularity of intelligent audio systems in recent years, their vulnerabilities have become an increasing public concern. Existing studies have designed a set of machine-induced audio attacks, such as replay attacks, synthesis attacks, hidden voice commands, inaudible attacks, and audio adversarial examples, which could expose users to serious security and privacy threats. To defend against these attacks, existing efforts have been treating them individually. While they have yielded reasonably good performance in certain cases, they can hardly be combined into an all-in-one solution to be deployed on the audio systems in practice. Additionally, modern intelligent audio devices, such as Amazon Echo and Apple HomePod, usually come equipped with microphone arrays for far-field voice recognition and noise reduction. Existing defense strategies have been focusing on single- and dual-channel audio, while only few studies have explored using multi-channel microphone array for defending specific types of audio attack. Motivated by the lack of systematic research on defending miscellaneous audio attacks and the potential benefits of multi-channel audio, this paper builds a holistic solution for detecting machine-induced audio attacks leveraging multi-channel microphone arrays on modern intelligent audio systems. Specifically, we utilize magnitude and phase spectrograms of multi-channel audio to extract spatial information and leverage a deep learning model to detect the fundamental difference between human speech and adversarial audio generated by the playback machines. Moreover, we adopt an unsupervised domain adaptation training framework to further improve the model's generalizability in new acoustic environments. Evaluation is conducted under various settings on a public multi-channel replay attack dataset and a self-collected multi-channel audio attack dataset involving 5 types of advanced audio attacks. The results show that our method can achieve an equal error rate (EER) as low as 6.6% in detecting a variety of machine-induced attacks. Even in new acoustic environments, our method can still achieve an EER as low as 8.8%.