# Inaudible Voice Commands

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.07238 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07238/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Can audio-visual integration strengthen robustness under multimodal attacks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02000/) (2021)
- [Dompteur: Taming Audio Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05431/) (2021)
- [SoK: A Modularized Approach to Study the Security of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10651/) (2021)
- [Robust Sensor Fusion Algorithms Against Voice Command Attacks in Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09872/) (2021)
- [NUANCE: Near Ultrasound Attack On Networked Communication Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10358/) (2023)
- [SoK: A Study of the Security on Voice Processing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13144/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Voice assistants like Siri enable us to control IoT devices conveniently with voice commands, however, they also provide new attack opportunities for adversaries. Previous papers attack voice assistants with obfuscated voice commands by leveraging the gap between speech recognition system and human voice perception. The limitation is that these obfuscated commands are audible and thus conspicuous to device owners. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism to directly attack the microphone used for sensing voice data with inaudible voice commands. We show that the adversary can exploit the microphone's non-linearity and play well-designed inaudible ultrasounds to cause the microphone to record normal voice commands, and thus control the victim device inconspicuously. We demonstrate via end-to-end real-world experiments that our inaudible voice commands can attack an Android phone and an Amazon Echo device with high success rates at a range of 2-3 meters.