Unauthorized editing of speech recordings poses a significant threat to the security and authenticity of speeches, particularly in the forensic and legal fields. Even worse, the speech is increasingly at risk of being tampered with due to the development of AI techniques (e.g., Audio Deepfake). It is difficult for normal users to guarantee what they say has not been illegally changed. Audio watermark techniques are recognized as an active method against speech forgery. However, such techniques suffer from audio quality degradation and non-real-time insertion. Therefore, they cannot be adopted into real-time voice applications against forgery on remote recordings, e.g., phone calls, live broadcasts, and online meetings. Fortunately, high-definition (HD) audio techniques provide ultrasonic bands without distortion. Therefore, ultrasonic creditable factors can be utilized. We propose an audio tamper-proof system, named Aegis. It provides commodity mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) with an effective method of real-time insertion of inaudible creditable factors. Users can claim that audio with no or mismatched ultrasound is invalid and illegal. In particular, we explore a novel acoustic nonlinear phenomenon where audible signals can be modulated onto the ultrasonic spectrum. By emphasizing the correlation between speech signals and ultrasound, we realize effective defense against various tampering methods. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Aegis yields a detection accuracy of 99.5% on average even against unseen tampering methods.

Covert eavesdropping via microphones has always been a major threat to user privacy. Benefiting from the acoustic non-linearity property, the ultrasonic microphone jammer (UMJ) is effective in resisting this long-standing attack. However, prior UMJ researches underestimate adversary's attacking capability in reality and miss critical metrics for a thorough evaluation. The strong assumptions of adversary unable to retrieve information under low word recognition rate, and adversary's weak denoising abilities in the threat model make these works overlook the vulnerability of existing UMJs. As a result, their UMJs' resilience is overestimated. In this paper, we refine the adversary model and completely investigate potential eavesdropping threats. Correspondingly, we define a total of 12 metrics that are necessary for evaluating UMJs' resilience. Using these metrics, we propose a comprehensive framework to quantify UMJs' practical resilience. It fully covers three perspectives that prior works ignored to some degree, i.e., ambient information, semantic comprehension, and collaborative recognition. Guided by this framework, we can thoroughly and quantitatively evaluate the resilience of existing UMJs towards eavesdroppers. Our extensive assessment results reveal that most existing UMJs are vulnerable to sophisticated adverse approaches. We further outline the key factors influencing jammers' performance and present constructive suggestions for UMJs' future designs.

In cyber-physical systems, inertial sensors are the basis for identifying motion states and making actuation decisions. However, extensive studies have proved the vulnerability of those sensors under acoustic transduction attacks, which leverage malicious acoustics to trigger sensor measurement errors. Unfortunately, the threat from such attacks is not assessed properly because of the incomplete investigation on the attack's potential, especially towards multiple-degree-of-freedom systems, e.g., drones. To thoroughly explore the threat of acoustic transduction attacks, we revisit the attack model and design a new yet practical acoustic modulation-based attack, named KITE. Such an attack enables stable and controllable injections, even under frequency offset based distortions that limit the effect of prior attacking approaches. KITE exploits the potential threat of transduction attacks without the need of strengthening attackers' abilities. Furthermore, we extend the attack surface to multiple-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) systems, which are more widely deployed but ignored by prior work. Our study also covers the scenario of attacking moving targets. By revealing the practical threat from acoustic transduction attacks, we appeal for both the attention to their harm and necessary countermeasures.

Incompatible protocols and electromagnetic interference obstruct the realization of an everything-connected Internet of Things (IoT) communication network. Our system, Deaf-Aid, utilizes a stealthy speaker-to-gyroscope channel to build robust communication. Compared with existing solutions adopting physical covert channels, Deaf-Aid is free from the limitations of manual receiver distinction, additional hardware, conditional placement, or physical contact. It exploits ultrasounds to force gyroscopes embedded in receivers to resonate, so as to convey information. We investigate the relationship among axes in a gyroscope to deal with frequency offset and support multi-channel communication. Meanwhile, receivers are identified automatically via device fingerprints consisting of diversity of gyroscopes’ resonant frequency ranges. Furthermore, we enable Deaf-Aid the capability of mobile communication, which is an essential demand for IoT devices. We address the challenge of recovering accurate signals from motion interference. Extensive evaluations, including that on the commercial off-the-shelf devices, demonstrate that Deaf-Aid yields 47 bps with BER below 1%. To our best knowledge, Deaf-Aid is the first work to enable stealthy mobile IoT communication based on inertial sensors.

Covert eavesdropping via microphones has always been a major threat to user privacy. Benefiting from the acoustic non-linearity property, the ultrasonic microphone jammer (UMJ) is effective in resisting this long-standing attack. However, prior UMJ researches underestimate adversary’s attacking capability in reality and miss critical metrics for a thorough evaluation. The strong assumptions of adversary unable to retrieve information under low word recognition rate, and adversary’s weak denoising abilities in the threat model make these works overlook the vulnerability of existing UMJs. As a result, their UMJs’ resilience is overestimated. In this paper, we refine the adversary model and completely investigate potential eavesdropping threats. Correspondingly, we define a total of 12 metrics that are necessary for evaluating UMJs’ resilience. Using these metrics, we propose a comprehensive framework to quantify UMJs’ practical resilience. It fully covers three perspectives that prior works ignored in some degree, i.e., ambient information, semantic comprehension, and collaborative recognition. Guided by this framework, we can thoroughly and quantitatively evaluate the resilience of existing UMJs towards eavesdroppers. Our extensive assessment results reveal that most existing UMJs are vulnerable to sophisticated adverse approaches. We further outline the key factors influencing jammers’ performance and present constructive suggestions for UMJs’ future designs.

In cyber-physical systems, inertial sensors are the basis for identifying motion states and making actuation decisions. However, extensive studies have proved the vulnerability of those sensors under acoustic transduction attacks, which leverage malicious acoustics to trigger sensor measurement errors. Unfortunately, the threat from such attacks is not assessed properly because of the incomplete investigation on the attack's potential, especially towards multiple-degree-of-freedom systems, e.g., drones. To thoroughly explore the threat of acoustic transduction attacks, we revisit the attack model and design a new yet practical acoustic modulation-based attack, named KITE. Such an attack enables stable and controllable injections, even under frequency offset based distortions that limit the effect of prior attacking approaches. KITE exploits the potential threat of transduction attacks without the need of strengthening attackers' abilities. Furthermore, we extend the attack surface to multiple-degree-of-freedom systems, which are more widely deployed but ignored by prior work. Our study also covers the scenario of attacking moving targets. By revealing the practical threat from acoustic transduction attacks, we appeal for both the attention to their harm and necessary countermeasures.