Alexa, can you hear me? Researchers have discovered a way to jam Amazon鈥檚 voice assistant Alexa from responding to commands.
鈥淚t was easier to exploit than we expected,鈥� says Juncheng Li at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
He and his colleagues created an audio clip that prevents Amazon鈥檚 system from responding to the 鈥淎lexa鈥� command word if it is played as you are speaking. Li says he expects that similar attacks would work against other voice assistants too. 鈥淭hese systems are all made in a very similar way,鈥� he says.
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Li and his team first created their own voice assistant, based on Alexa. They developed an audio attack clip using an AI that attempted to generated guitar sounds that the voice assistant didn鈥檛 respond to 鈥� their goal was to find a sound the assistant would ignore.
They then tried the attack on Alexa. When the clip was playing, Alexa responded to the audio cue 鈥淎lexa鈥� only 11 per cent of the time, compared with 80 per cent of the time when other music was playing and 93 per cent of the time when no audio clip was playing at all.
Li says these types of attacks could be used to prank, confuse or distract people, which could be a particular concern if they are driving 鈥� . Thankfully, Li says it should be fairly easy for Amazon to modify Alexa to detect and avoid such attacks.
Mathana Stender, a tech ethicist based in Berlin, Germany, says the attack shows that tech companies need to be able to respond quickly to vulnerabilities. 鈥淭here鈥檚 going to be more and more attack vectors like this, companies need to think about how they design these systems and how they are patched.鈥�
When asked about the attack, Amazon responded: 鈥淐ustomer trust is our top priority and we take customer security seriously. We are reviewing the findings of this research paper. What is demonstrated poses very little impact on customers. It would require specific audio samples to be played at the same time as a user saying the wake word and would only increase times where the wake word is not detected.鈥�
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