@inproceedings{1723d95869834391bb66e5561b59e576,
title = "EchoSafe: Sonar-based Verifiable Interaction with Intelligent Digital Agents",
abstract = "Voice controlled interactive smart speakers, such as Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod are becoming commonplace in today{\textquoteright}s homes. These devices listen continually for the user commands, that are triggered by special keywords, such as {"}Alexa{"} and {"}Hey Siri{"}. Recent research has shown that these devices are vulnerable to attacks through malicious voice commands from nearby devices. The commands can be sent easily during unoccupied periods, so that the user may be unaware of such attacks. We present EchoSafe, a user-friendly sonar-based defense against these attacks. When the user sends a critical command to the smart speaker, EchoSafe sends an audio pulse followed by post processing to determine if the user is present in the room. We can detect the user{\textquoteright}s presence during critical commands with 93.13% accuracy, and our solution can be extended to defend against other attack scenarios, as well.",
keywords = "Alexa, Echo, Internet of things, Security, Siri, Smart home, Smart speakers",
author = "Amr Alanwar and Bharathan Balaji and Yuan Tian and Mani Srivastava and Shuo Yang",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to Association for Computing Machinery.; 1st ACM International Workshop on the Internet of Safe Things, SafeThings 2017 ; Conference date: 05-11-2017",
year = "2017",
month = nov,
day = "5",
doi = "10.1145/3137003.3137014",
language = "English",
series = "SafeThings 2017 - Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Workshop on the Internet of Safe Things, Part of SenSys 2017",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery, Inc",
pages = "38--43",
editor = "Rasit Eskicioglu",
booktitle = "SafeThings 2017 - Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Workshop on the Internet of Safe Things, Part of SenSys 2017",
}