# Security and Privacy Problems in Voice Assistant Applications: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.09486 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09486/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Audio Adversarial Examples: Targeted Attacks on Speech-to-Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01944/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Attacks Against Automatic Speech Recognition Systems via Psychoacoustic Hiding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05665/) (2018)
- [DolphinAtack: Inaudible Voice Commands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09537/) (2017)
- [Who is Real Bob? Adversarial Attacks on Speaker Recognition Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01840/) (2019)
- [Backdoor Attack against Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11607/) (2020)
- [Can You Hear It? Backdoor Attacks via Ultrasonic Triggers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14569/) (2021)
- [Targeted Adversarial Examples for Black Box Audio Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07820/) (2018)
- [WaveGuard: Understanding and Mitigating Audio Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03344/) (2021)
- [Hear "No Evil", See "Kenansville": Efficient and Transferable Black-Box Attacks on Speech Recognition and Voice Identification Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05262/) (2019)
- [Practical Hidden Voice Attacks against Speech and Speaker Recognition Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05734/) (2019)
- [Measuring the Effectiveness of Privacy Policies for Voice Assistant Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14570/) (2020)
- [LeakyPick: IoT Audio Spy Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00500/) (2020)
- [SkillBot: Identifying Risky Content for Children in Alexa Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03382/) (2021)
- [FakeWake: Understanding and Mitigating Fake Wake-up Words of Voice Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09958/) (2021)
- [Speech Replay Detection with x-Vector Attack Embeddings and Spectral Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10324/) (2019)
- [On the Feasibility of Acoustic Attacks Using Commodity Smart Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07157/) (2020)
- [Detecting Audio Adversarial Examples with Logit Noising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06443/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The Eye of Sherlock Holmes: Uncovering User Private Attribute Profiling via Vision-Language Model Agentic Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19139/) (2025)
- [Degrading Voice: A Comprehensive Overview of Robust Voice Conversion Through Input Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06304/) (2025)
- [From Acoustic Sensing to Physical Actions: A Comprehensive Survey of Security Risks in Edge-Deployed Audio LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15390/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Voice assistant applications have become omniscient nowadays. Two models that provide the two most important functions for real-life applications (i.e., Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Siri, etc.) are Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models and Speaker Identification (SI) models. According to recent studies, security and privacy threats have also emerged with the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT). The security issues researched include attack techniques toward machine learning models and other hardware components widely used in voice assistant applications. The privacy issues include technical-wise information stealing and policy-wise privacy breaches. The voice assistant application takes a steadily growing market share every year, but their privacy and security issues never stopped causing huge economic losses and endangering users' personal sensitive information. Thus, it is important to have a comprehensive survey to outline the categorization of the current research regarding the security and privacy problems of voice assistant applications. This paper concludes and assesses five kinds of security attacks and three types of privacy threats in the papers published in the top-tier conferences of cyber security and voice domain.