Secure Automatic Speaker Verification Systems

The growing number of voice-enabled devices and applications consider automatic speaker verification (ASV) a fundamental component. However, maximum outreach for ASV in critical domains e.g., financial services and health care, is not possible unless we overcome security breaches caused by voice cloning, and replayed audios collectively known as the spoofing attacks. The audio spoofing attacks over ASV systems on one hand strictly limit the usability of voice-enabled applications; and on the other hand, the counterfeiter also remains untraceable. Therefore, to overcome these vulnerabilities, a secure ASV (SASV) system is presented in this dissertation. The proposed SASV system is based on the concept of novel sign modified acoustic local ternary pattern (sm-ALTP) features and asymmetric bagging-based classifier-ensemble. The proposed audio representation approach clusters the high and low-frequency components in audio frames by normally distributing frequency components against a convex function. Then, the neighborhood statistics are applied to capture the user specific vocal tract information. This information is then utilized by the classifier ensemble that is based on the concept of weighted normalized voting rule to detect various spoofing attacks. Contrary to the existing ASV systems, the proposed SASV system not only detects the conventional spoofing attacks (i.e. voice cloning, and replays), but also the new attacks that are still unexplored by the research community and a requirement of the future. In this regard, a concept of cloned replays is presented in this dissertation, where, replayed audios contains the microphone characteristics as well as the voice cloning artifacts. This depicts the scenario when voice cloning is applied in real-time. The voice cloning artifacts suppresses the microphone characteristics thus fails replay detection modules and similarly with the amalgamation of microphone characteristics the voice cloning detection gets deceived. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can be utilized to obtain a possible clue against the counterfeiter through voice cloning algorithm detection module that is also a novel concept proposed in this dissertation. The voice cloning algorithm detection module determines the voice cloning algorithm used to generate the fake audios. Overall, the proposed SASV system simultaneously verifies the bonafide speakers and detects the voice cloning attack, cloning algorithm used to synthesize cloned audio (in the defined settings), and voice-replay attacks over the ASVspoof 2019 dataset. In addition, the proposed method detects the voice replay and cloned voice replay attacks over the VSDC dataset. Rigorous experimentation against state-of-the-art approaches also confirms the robustness of the proposed research

Spoofing Detection in Voice Biometrics: Cochlear Modelling and Perceptually Motivated Features

The automatic speaker verification (ASV) system is one of the most widely adopted biometric technology. However, ASV is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can significantly affect its reliability. Among the different variants of spoofing attacks, replay attacks pose a major threat as they do not require any expert knowledge to implement and are difficult to detect. The primary focus of this thesis is on understanding and developing biologically inspired models and techniques to detect replay attacks. This thesis develops a novel framework for implementing an active cochlear filter model as a frontend spectral analyser for spoofing attack detection to leverage the remarkable sensitivity and selectivity of the mammalian auditory system over a broad range of intensities and frequencies. In particular, the developed model aims to mimic the active mechanism in the cochlea, enabling sharp frequency tuning and level-dependent compression, which amplifies and tune to low energy signal to make a broad dynamic range of signals audible. Experimental evaluations of the developed models in the context of replay detection systems exhibit a significant performance improvement, highlighting the potential benefits of the use of biologically inspired front ends. In addition, since replay detection relies on the discerning channel characteristics and the effect of the acoustic environment, acoustic cues essential for speech perception such as amplitude- and frequency-modulation (AM, FM) features are also investigated. Finally, to capture discriminative cues present in the temporal domain, the temporal masking psychoacoustic phenomenon in auditory processing is exploited, and the usefulness of the masking pattern is investigated. This led to a novel feature parameterisation which helps improve replay attack detection

Image and Video Forensics

Nowadays, images and videos have become the main modalities of information being exchanged in everyday life, and their pervasiveness has led the image forensics community to question their reliability, integrity, confidentiality, and security. Multimedia contents are generated in many different ways through the use of consumer electronics and high-quality digital imaging devices, such as smartphones, digital cameras, tablets, and wearable and IoT devices. The ever-increasing convenience of image acquisition has facilitated instant distribution and sharing of digital images on digital social platforms, determining a great amount of exchange data. Moreover, the pervasiveness of powerful image editing tools has allowed the manipulation of digital images for malicious or criminal ends, up to the creation of synthesized images and videos with the use of deep learning techniques. In response to these threats, the multimedia forensics community has produced major research efforts regarding the identification of the source and the detection of manipulation. In all cases (e.g., forensic investigations, fake news debunking, information warfare, and cyberattacks) where images and videos serve as critical evidence, forensic technologies that help to determine the origin, authenticity, and integrity of multimedia content can become essential tools. This book aims to collect a diverse and complementary set of articles that demonstrate new developments and applications in image and video forensics to tackle new and serious challenges to ensure media authenticity

Análise de propriedades intrínsecas e extrínsecas de amostras biométricas para detecção de ataques de apresentação

Orientadores: Anderson de Rezende Rocha, Hélio PedriniTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Os recentes avanços nas áreas de pesquisa em biometria, forense e segurança da informação trouxeram importantes melhorias na eficácia dos sistemas de reconhecimento biométricos. No entanto, um desafio ainda em aberto é a vulnerabilidade de tais sistemas contra ataques de apresentação, nos quais os usuários impostores criam amostras sintéticas, a partir das informações biométricas originais de um usuário legítimo, e as apresentam ao sensor de aquisição procurando se autenticar como um usuário válido. Dependendo da modalidade biométrica, os tipos de ataque variam de acordo com o tipo de material usado para construir as amostras sintéticas. Por exemplo, em biometria facial, uma tentativa de ataque é caracterizada quando um usuário impostor apresenta ao sensor de aquisição uma fotografia, um vídeo digital ou uma máscara 3D com as informações faciais de um usuário-alvo. Em sistemas de biometria baseados em íris, os ataques de apresentação podem ser realizados com fotografias impressas ou com lentes de contato contendo os padrões de íris de um usuário-alvo ou mesmo padrões de textura sintéticas. Nos sistemas biométricos de impressão digital, os usuários impostores podem enganar o sensor biométrico usando réplicas dos padrões de impressão digital construídas com materiais sintéticos, como látex, massa de modelar, silicone, entre outros. Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo o desenvolvimento de soluções para detecção de ataques de apresentação considerando os sistemas biométricos faciais, de íris e de impressão digital. As linhas de investigação apresentadas nesta tese incluem o desenvolvimento de representações baseadas nas informações espaciais, temporais e espectrais da assinatura de ruído; em propriedades intrínsecas das amostras biométricas (e.g., mapas de albedo, de reflectância e de profundidade) e em técnicas de aprendizagem supervisionada de características. Os principais resultados e contribuições apresentadas nesta tese incluem: a criação de um grande conjunto de dados publicamente disponível contendo aproximadamente 17K videos de simulações de ataques de apresentações e de acessos genuínos em um sistema biométrico facial, os quais foram coletados com a autorização do Comitê de Ética em Pesquisa da Unicamp; o desenvolvimento de novas abordagens para modelagem e análise de propriedades extrínsecas das amostras biométricas relacionadas aos artefatos que são adicionados durante a fabricação das amostras sintéticas e sua captura pelo sensor de aquisição, cujos resultados de desempenho foram superiores a diversos métodos propostos na literature que se utilizam de métodos tradicionais de análise de images (e.g., análise de textura); a investigação de uma abordagem baseada na análise de propriedades intrínsecas das faces, estimadas a partir da informação de sombras presentes em sua superfície; e, por fim, a investigação de diferentes abordagens baseadas em redes neurais convolucionais para o aprendizado automático de características relacionadas ao nosso problema, cujos resultados foram superiores ou competitivos aos métodos considerados estado da arte para as diferentes modalidades biométricas consideradas nesta tese. A pesquisa também considerou o projeto de eficientes redes neurais com arquiteturas rasas capazes de aprender características relacionadas ao nosso problema a partir de pequenos conjuntos de dados disponíveis para o desenvolvimento e a avaliação de soluções para a detecção de ataques de apresentaçãoAbstract: Recent advances in biometrics, information forensics, and security have improved the recognition effectiveness of biometric systems. However, an ever-growing challenge is the vulnerability of such systems against presentation attacks, in which impostor users create synthetic samples from the original biometric information of a legitimate user and show them to the acquisition sensor seeking to authenticate themselves as legitimate users. Depending on the trait used by the biometric authentication, the attack types vary with the type of material used to build the synthetic samples. For instance, in facial biometric systems, an attempted attack is characterized by the type of material the impostor uses such as a photograph, a digital video, or a 3D mask with the facial information of a target user. In iris-based biometrics, presentation attacks can be accomplished with printout photographs or with contact lenses containing the iris patterns of a target user or even synthetic texture patterns. In fingerprint biometric systems, impostor users can deceive the authentication process using replicas of the fingerprint patterns built with synthetic materials such as latex, play-doh, silicone, among others. This research aimed at developing presentation attack detection (PAD) solutions whose objective is to detect attempted attacks considering different attack types, in each modality. The lines of investigation presented in this thesis aimed at devising and developing representations based on spatial, temporal and spectral information from noise signature, intrinsic properties of the biometric data (e.g., albedo, reflectance, and depth maps), and supervised feature learning techniques, taking into account different testing scenarios including cross-sensor, intra-, and inter-dataset scenarios. The main findings and contributions presented in this thesis include: the creation of a large and publicly available benchmark containing 17K videos of presentation attacks and bona-fide presentations simulations in a facial biometric system, whose collect were formally authorized by the Research Ethics Committee at Unicamp; the development of novel approaches to modeling and analysis of extrinsic properties of biometric samples related to artifacts added during the manufacturing of the synthetic samples and their capture by the acquisition sensor, whose results were superior to several approaches published in the literature that use traditional methods for image analysis (e.g., texture-based analysis); the investigation of an approach based on the analysis of intrinsic properties of faces, estimated from the information of shadows present on their surface; and the investigation of different approaches to automatically learning representations related to our problem, whose results were superior or competitive to state-of-the-art methods for the biometric modalities considered in this thesis. We also considered in this research the design of efficient neural networks with shallow architectures capable of learning characteristics related to our problem from small sets of data available to develop and evaluate PAD solutionsDoutoradoCiência da ComputaçãoDoutor em Ciência da Computação140069/2016-0 CNPq, 142110/2017-5CAPESCNP