Black-box Adversarial Attacks on Commercial Speech Platforms with Minimal Information
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Abstract (arXiv)
Adversarial attacks against commercial black-box speech platforms, including cloud speech APIs and voice control devices, have received little attention until recent years. The current "black-box" attacks all heavily rely on the knowledge of prediction/confidence scores to craft effective adversarial examples, which can be intuitively defended by service providers without returning these messages. In this paper, we propose two novel adversarial attacks in more practical and rigorous scenarios. For commercial cloud speech APIs, we propose Occam, a decision-only black-box adversarial attack, where only final decisions are available to the adversary. In Occam, we formulate the decision-only AE generation as a discontinuous large-scale global optimization problem, and solve it by adaptively decomposing this complicated problem into a set of sub-problems and cooperatively optimizing each one. Our Occam is a one-size-fits-all approach, which achieves 100% success rates of attacks with an average SNR of 14.23dB, on a wide range of popular speech and speaker recognition APIs, including Google, Alibaba, Microsoft, Tencent, iFlytek, and Jingdong, outperforming the state-of-the-art black-box attacks. For commercial voice control devices, we propose NI-Occam, the first non-interactive physical adversarial attack, where the adversary does not need to query the oracle and has no access to its internal information and training data. We combine adversarial attacks with model inversion attacks, and thus generate the physically-effective audio AEs with high transferability without any interaction with target devices. Our experimental results show that NI-Occam can successfully fool Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, iFlytek and Amazon Echo with an average SRoA of 52% and SNR of 9.65dB, shedding light on non-interactive physical attacks against voice control devices.
Key facts. Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 42 of its 92 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2021.
Builds on
42 of 92 references.
References · 42
- 2014Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examplescited by 7,287
- 2017Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attackscited by 6,326
- 2013Intriguing properties of neural networkscited by 5,114
- 2016Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networkscited by 2,976
- 2015DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networkscited by 1,315
- 2017Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defensescited by 833
- 2020Fast is better than free: Revisiting adversarial trainingcited by 723
- 2017VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification datasetcited by 714
- 2013Speech Recognition with Deep Recurrent Neural Networkscited by 666
- 2017ZOO: Zeroth Order Optimization based Black-box Attacks to Deep Neural Networks without Training Substitute Modelscited by 656
- 2019Adversarial Training for Free!cited by 638
- 2017Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks: Reliable Attacks Against Black-Box Machine Learning Modelscited by 459
30 more
- 2016The CMA Evolution Strategy: A Tutorialcited by 364
- 2014Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognitioncited by 354
- 2019HopSkipJumpAttack: A Query-Efficient Decision-Based Attackcited by 328
- 2020AdaBelief Optimizer: Adapting Stepsizes by the Belief in Observed Gradientscited by 282
- 2021Recent Advances in Adversarial Training for Adversarial Robustnesscited by 276
- 2018Audio Adversarial Examples: Targeted Attacks on Speech-to-Textcited by 268
- 2019The Secret Revealer: Generative Model-Inversion Attacks Against Deep Neural Networkscited by 241
- 2019Efficient Decision-based Black-box Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognitioncited by 173
- 2018Query-Efficient Hard-label Black-box Attack:An Optimization-based Approachcited by 130
- 2019Imperceptible, Robust, and Targeted Adversarial Examples for Automatic Speech Recognitioncited by 123
- 2018Exploring Architectures, Data and Units For Streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition with RNN-Transducercited by 95
- 2018Curriculum Adversarial Trainingcited by 89
- 2018Adversarial Attacks Against Automatic Speech Recognition Systems via Psychoacoustic Hidingcited by 83
- 2018GenAttack: Practical Black-box Attacks with Gradient-Free Optimizationcited by 82
- 2019Who is Real Bob? Adversarial Attacks on Speaker Recognition Systemscited by 66
- 2017DolphinAtack: Inaudible Voice Commandscited by 65
- 2018CommanderSong: A Systematic Approach for Practical Adversarial Voice Recognitioncited by 63
- 2019Instance adaptive adversarial training: Improved accuracy tradeoffs in neural netscited by 55
- 2018Robust Audio Adversarial Example for a Physical Attackcited by 42
- 2018Targeted Adversarial Examples for Black Box Audio Systemscited by 41
- 2018Fooling End-to-end Speaker Verification by Adversarial Examplescited by 39
- 2018Characterizing Audio Adversarial Examples Using Temporal Dependencycited by 34
- 2019Practical Hidden Voice Attacks against Speech and Speaker Recognition Systemscited by 34
- 2019SirenAttack: Generating Adversarial Audio for End-to-End Acoustic Systemscited by 33
- 2017Crafting Adversarial Examples For Speech Paralinguistics Applicationscited by 30
- 2020Adversarial Attack and Defense Strategies for Deep Speaker Recognition Systemscited by 21
- 2021Adversarial example generation with AdaBelief Optimizer and Crop Invariancecited by 12
- 2021Study of Pre-processing Defenses against Adversarial Attacks on State-of-the-art Speaker Recognition Systemscited by 10
- 2021Generalizing Adversarial Examples by AdaBelief Optimizercited by 2
- 2018Adversarial Black-Box Attacks on Automatic Speech Recognition Systems using Multi-Objective Evolutionary Optimizationcited by 1
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 7; 2023: 6; 2024: 6; 2025: 1; 2026: 5.
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- 2022"Real Attackers Don't Compute Gradients": Bridging the Gap Between Adversarial ML Research and Practicecited by 55
- 2022Towards Understanding and Mitigating Audio Adversarial Examples for Speaker Recognitioncited by 22
- 2023SLMIA-SR: Speaker-Level Membership Inference Attacks against Speaker Recognition Systemscited by 14
- 2023Evading Black-box Classifiers Without Breaking Eggscited by 13
- 2024Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech Foundation Modelscited by 12
- 2023QFA2SR: Query-Free Adversarial Transfer Attacks to Speaker Recognition Systemscited by 9
- 2023MASTERKEY: Practical Backdoor Attack Against Speaker Verification Systemscited by 8
- 2022Multi-SpacePhish: Extending the Evasion-space of Adversarial Attacks against Phishing Website Detectors using Machine Learningcited by 7
- 2024AttackGNN: Red-Teaming GNNs in Hardware Security Using Reinforcement Learningcited by 6
- 2022Improving transferability of 3D adversarial attacks with scale and shear transformationscited by 5
- 2023PhantomSound: Black-Box, Query-Efficient Audio Adversarial Attack via Split-Second Phoneme Injectioncited by 5
- 2024ALIF: Low-Cost Adversarial Audio Attacks on Black-Box Speech Platforms using Linguistic Featurescited by 5
13 more
- 2022Perception-Aware Attack: Creating Adversarial Music via Reverse-Engineering Human Perceptioncited by 3
- 2024Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems via Audio Style Transfercited by 2
- 2024Controlling Whisper: Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Control Speech Foundation Modelscited by 2
- 2026Scores Know Bobs Voice: Speaker Impersonation Attackcited by 2
- 2022Disappeared Command: Spoofing Attack On Automatic Speech Recognition Systems with Sound Maskingcited by 1
- 2022Adversarial Attacks on ASR Systems: An Overviewcited by 1
- 2023Towards the Transferable Audio Adversarial Attack via Ensemble Methodscited by 1
- 2025Investigating Vulnerabilities and Defenses Against Audio-Visual Attacks: A Comprehensive Survey Emphasizing Multimodal Modelscited by 1
- 2026Sparse Tokens Suffice: Jailbreaking Audio Language Models via Token-Aware Gradient Optimizationcited by 1
- 2024Vulnerabilities in Machine Learning-Based Voice Disorder Detection Systemscited by 0
- 2026Low-Cost Hard-Label Adversarial Attack with Theoretical Foundationscited by 0
- 2026Generative Testing of Automated Speech Recognition Systemscited by 0
- 2026Casting the Net! Revisiting MasterFace Impersonation Attackscited by 0
- 2026Casting the Net! Revisiting MasterFace Impersonation Attacks7 Aug 2026
- 2026Generative Testing of Automated Speech Recognition Systems10 Jul 2026
- 2026Sparse Tokens Suffice: Jailbreaking Audio Language Models via Token-Aware Gradient Optimization6 May 2026
- 2026Scores Know Bobs Voice: Speaker Impersonation Attack3 Mar 2026
- 2026Low-Cost Hard-Label Adversarial Attack with Theoretical Foundations17 Jan 2026
- 2025Investigating Vulnerabilities and Defenses Against Audio-Visual Attacks: A Comprehensive Survey Emphasizing Multimodal Models13 Jun 2025
- 2024Vulnerabilities in Machine Learning-Based Voice Disorder Detection Systems21 Oct 2024
- 2024ALIF: Low-Cost Adversarial Audio Attacks on Black-Box Speech Platforms using Linguistic Features3 Aug 2024
- 2024Controlling Whisper: Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Control Speech Foundation Models5 Jul 2024
- 2024Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems via Audio Style Transfer15 May 2024
- 2024Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech Foundation Models9 May 2024
- 2024AttackGNN: Red-Teaming GNNs in Hardware Security Using Reinforcement Learning21 Feb 2024
13 more
- 2023SLMIA-SR: Speaker-Level Membership Inference Attacks against Speaker Recognition Systems14 Sep 2023
- 2023MASTERKEY: Practical Backdoor Attack Against Speaker Verification Systems13 Sep 2023
- 2023PhantomSound: Black-Box, Query-Efficient Audio Adversarial Attack via Split-Second Phoneme Injection13 Sep 2023
- 2023Evading Black-box Classifiers Without Breaking Eggs5 Jun 2023
- 2023QFA2SR: Query-Free Adversarial Transfer Attacks to Speaker Recognition Systems23 May 2023
- 2023Towards the Transferable Audio Adversarial Attack via Ensemble Methods18 Apr 2023
- 2022"Real Attackers Don't Compute Gradients": Bridging the Gap Between Adversarial ML Research and Practice29 Dec 2022
- 2022Improving transferability of 3D adversarial attacks with scale and shear transformations2 Nov 2022
- 2022Multi-SpacePhish: Extending the Evasion-space of Adversarial Attacks against Phishing Website Detectors using Machine Learning24 Oct 2022
- 2022Adversarial Attacks on ASR Systems: An Overview3 Aug 2022
- 2022Perception-Aware Attack: Creating Adversarial Music via Reverse-Engineering Human Perception26 Jul 2022
- 2022Towards Understanding and Mitigating Audio Adversarial Examples for Speaker Recognition7 Jun 2022
- 2022Disappeared Command: Spoofing Attack On Automatic Speech Recognition Systems with Sound Masking19 Apr 2022
- 2022"Real Attackers Don't Compute Gradients": Bridging the Gap Between Adversarial ML Research and Practicecited by 55
- 2022Towards Understanding and Mitigating Audio Adversarial Examples for Speaker Recognitioncited by 22
- 2023Evading Black-box Classifiers Without Breaking Eggscited by 13
- 2024Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech Foundation Modelscited by 12
- 2023QFA2SR: Query-Free Adversarial Transfer Attacks to Speaker Recognition Systemscited by 9
- 2023MASTERKEY: Practical Backdoor Attack Against Speaker Verification Systemscited by 8
- 2022Multi-SpacePhish: Extending the Evasion-space of Adversarial Attacks against Phishing Website Detectors using Machine Learningcited by 7
- 2024AttackGNN: Red-Teaming GNNs in Hardware Security Using Reinforcement Learningcited by 6
- 2022Improving transferability of 3D adversarial attacks with scale and shear transformationscited by 5
- 2023PhantomSound: Black-Box, Query-Efficient Audio Adversarial Attack via Split-Second Phoneme Injectioncited by 5
- 2024ALIF: Low-Cost Adversarial Audio Attacks on Black-Box Speech Platforms using Linguistic Featurescited by 5
- 2022Perception-Aware Attack: Creating Adversarial Music via Reverse-Engineering Human Perceptioncited by 3
12 most cited of 22 All 22 (JSON)
- 2026Casting the Net! Revisiting MasterFace Impersonation Attacks7 Aug 2026
- 2026Generative Testing of Automated Speech Recognition Systems10 Jul 2026
- 2026Scores Know Bobs Voice: Speaker Impersonation Attack3 Mar 2026
- 2026Low-Cost Hard-Label Adversarial Attack with Theoretical Foundations17 Jan 2026
- 2024Vulnerabilities in Machine Learning-Based Voice Disorder Detection Systems21 Oct 2024
- 2024ALIF: Low-Cost Adversarial Audio Attacks on Black-Box Speech Platforms using Linguistic Features3 Aug 2024
- 2024Controlling Whisper: Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Control Speech Foundation Models5 Jul 2024
- 2024Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems via Audio Style Transfer15 May 2024
- 2024Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech Foundation Models9 May 2024
- 2024AttackGNN: Red-Teaming GNNs in Hardware Security Using Reinforcement Learning21 Feb 2024
- 2023MASTERKEY: Practical Backdoor Attack Against Speaker Verification Systems13 Sep 2023
- 2023PhantomSound: Black-Box, Query-Efficient Audio Adversarial Attack via Split-Second Phoneme Injection13 Sep 2023
12 newest of 22 All 22 (JSON)