Overo: Sharing Private Audio Recordings

Abstract

The use of smartphones as voice recorders has made it easy to record audios as proof of conversations, but sharing of such audio evidence incurs speech and voice privacy risks. However, protecting speech/voice privacy without losing audio authenticity is challenging. The conventional post-process redaction and voice conversion of audio recordings, which invalidate their original signatures, make the audio unverifiable and prone to tampering. In this paper, we present Overo, an audio recording/sharing solution that supports privacy processing without losing audio authenticity. Overo records a realtime audio stream in the standard AAC-encoded format and allows privacy post-processing prior to sharing of audios while keeping their original signatures valid (even after the post redaction and voice conversion), guaranteeing no tampering since the time of their recording. Therefore, users can post-process their recordings to desired levels of privacy on speech (what content to redact) and speakers (whose voice to disguise) at the time of audio release, and still prove their authenticity. Overo is readily implementable in today's commodity smartphones. Our prototype on iPhones/Android phones demonstrates the production of AAC-compliant, tamperproof, and self-authenticating audios with speech/voice privacy protected based on users' post-recording decisions.