Shimaa Ahmed, a PhD student working in the lab of Professor Kassem Fawaz, determined a method of defeating automatic speaker identification systems using the sort of PVC pipe found at any hardware store. Todd Brown
Researchers are in an arms race with hackers to prevent data theft. Their standard tools include strategies like multi-factor authentication systems, fingerprint technology and retinal scans. One type of security system that is gaining popularity is automatic speaker identification, which uses a person’s voice as a passcode.
These systems, already in use for phone banking and other applications, are good at weeding out attacks that try to fake a user’s voice through digital manipulation. But digital security engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have found these systems are not quite as foolproof when it comes to a novel analog attack. They found…
