Wearable Security Auxiliary of Voice Signature

Talking to electronics is popular in this era of technology. Through voice assistants, people connect each other more efficiently, and actually more secure. Recently, Barclays bank began to use voice-based security to verify and to identify their customers. But sound can be spoofed and hacked easily by mediocre impersonators and sophisticated hackers.

According to Kang Shin, the Kevin and Nancy O'Connor Professor of Computer Science and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at U-M, it is dangerous to only use voice signature in a system, one must have a second channel to authenticate the voice. 

Shin and his colleagues developed VAuth, which is a wearable device that can take the form of a necklace, earbuds or a small attachment to eyeglasses. VAuth continuously registers speech-induced vibrations on the user's body and pairs them with the sound of that person's voice to create a unique and secure signature. The process of speaking creates vibrations that can be detected on the skin of a person's face, throat or chest. The system works by leveraging the instantaneous consistency between signals from the accelerometer in the wearable security token and the microphone in the electronic device.

In addition, VAuth also overcomes a key problem of voice biometrics. A voice biometric, similar to a fingerprint, is not easy to keep protected. From a few recordings of the user's voice, an attacker can impersonate the user by generating a matching 'voice print.'

"The users can do little to regain their security as they cannot simply change their voice. On the other hand, when losing VAuth for any reason, the user can simply unpair it to prevent an attacker from using their device.

After the tests on its prototype, it achieved 97% detection accuracy and less than 0.1% false positive rate, and it also thwarts different practical attacks. According to the survey, out of 952 people, 70% of them are willing to give a try on VAuth, half of them are willing to pay more than $25 for the technology.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-wearables-boost-voice-based-log-in.html