BarrierBypass: Out-of-Sight Clean Voice Command Injection Attacks through Physical Barriers
Payton Walker, Tianfang Zhang, Cong Shi, Yingying (Jennifer) Chen, Nitesh Saxena
Abstract
The growing adoption of voice-enabled devices (e.g., smart speakers), particularly in smart home environments, has introduced many security vulnerabilities that pose significant threats to users' privacy and safety. When multiple devices are connected to a voice assistant, an attacker can cause serious damage if they can gain control of these devices. In consideration of these security risks, we ask where and how can an attacker issue clean voice commands stealthily across a physical barrier, and perform the first academic measurement study of this nature on the command injection attack. We present the BarrierBypass attack that can be launched against three different barrier-based scenarios termed across-door, across-window, and across-wall. We conduct a broad set of experiments to observe the command injection attack success rates for multiple speaker samples (TTS and live human recorded) at different command audio volumes (65, 75, 85 dB), and smart speaker locations (0.1-4.0m from barrier).
Against Amazon Echo Dot 2, BarrierBypass is able to achieve 100% wake word and command injection success for the across-wall and across-window attacks, and for the across-door attack (up to 2 meters). At 4 meters for the across-door attack, BarrierBypass can achieve 90% and 80% injection accuracy for the wake word and command, respectively. Against Google Home mini BarrierBypass is able to achieve 100% wake word injection accuracy for all attack scenarios. For command injection BarrierBypass can achieve 100% accuracy for all the three barrier settings (up to 2 meters). For the across-door attack at 4 meters, BarrierBypass can achieve 80% command injection accuracy. Further, our demonstration using drones yielded high command injection success. We achieved up to 100% command injection success for the highest performing command audio samples in the drone-based scenario. Overall, our results demonstrate the potentially devastating nature of this vulnerability to control a user's device from outside of the device's physical space, and its limitations, without the need for complex and error-prone command injection.