Securing Voice-driven Interfaces against Fake (Cloned) Audio Attacks

Voice cloning technologies have found applications in a variety of areas ranging from personalized speech interfaces to advertisement, robotics, and so on. Existing voice cloning systems are capable of learning speaker characteristics and use trained models to synthesize a person's voice from only a few audio samples. Advances in cloned speech generation technologies are capable of generating perceptually indistinguishable speech from a bona-fide speech. These advances pose new security and privacy threats to voice-driven interfaces and speech-based access control systems. The state-of-the-art speech synthesis technologies use trained or tuned generative models for cloned speech generation. Trained generative models rely on linear operations, learned weights, and excitation source for cloned speech synthesis. These systems leave characteristic artifacts in the synthesized speech. Higher-order spectral analysis is used to capture differentiating attributes between bona-fide and cloned audios. Specifically, quadrature phase coupling (QPC) in the estimated bicoherence, Gaussianity test statistics, and linearity test statistics are used to capture generative model artifacts. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated on cloned audios generated using speaker adaptation- and speaker encoding-based approaches. Experimental results for a dataset consisting of 126 cloned speech and 8 bona-fide speech samples indicate that the proposed method is capable of detecting bona-fide and cloned audios with close to a perfect detection rate.Comment: 6 pages, The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on "Fake MultiMedia" (FakeMM'19) March 28-30, 2019, San Jose, CA, US

Generation of Time-Varying Impedance Attacks Against Haptic Shared Control Steering Systems

The safety-critical nature of vehicle steering is one of the main motivations for exploring the space of possible cyber-physical attacks against the steering systems of modern vehicles. This paper investigates the adversarial capabilities for destabilizing the interaction dynamics between human drivers and vehicle haptic shared control (HSC) steering systems. In contrast to the conventional robotics literature, where the main objective is to render the human-automation interaction dynamics stable by ensuring passivity, this paper takes the exact opposite route. In particular, to investigate the damaging capabilities of a successful cyber-physical attack, this paper demonstrates that an attacker who targets the HSC steering system can destabilize the interaction dynamics between the human driver and the vehicle HSC steering system through synthesis of time-varying impedance profiles. Specifically, it is shown that the adversary can utilize a properly designed non-passive and time-varying adversarial impedance target dynamics, which are fed with a linear combination of the human driver and the steering column torques. Using these target dynamics, it is possible for the adversary to generate in real-time a reference angular command for the driver input device and the directional control steering assembly of the vehicle. Furthermore, it is shown that the adversary can make the steering wheel and the vehicle steering column angular positions to follow the reference command generated by the time-varying impedance target dynamics using proper adaptive control strategies. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of such time-varying impedance attacks, which result in a non-passive and inherently unstable interaction between the driver and the HSC steering system.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figures, accepted in The 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023), Detroit, MI, Oct. 202

The remedial solutions of the issues of Pakistan in 2022 in the light of Qur’ān and Sunnah

Islam is a religion which encompasses the whole important aspects of life including political, economic, collective, ideological and military perspectives. It has also a significant proportion and balance of life in Islam.  So, it also sustains the subtle balance in all walks of life. It creates a balance between the rights of people which may be collective or individual. As he depicts the responsibilities of the Rulers and masses as they have their own coordinate rights and duties. It is also a fact that un-Islamic ideologies have been ruling the whole world and they attacked from the East and West and showed their control over the Islamic Countries. But now there is a strong wave of change in order to implement their Islamic ideologies in the Islamic countries such as Pakistan, in the light of glorious Quran and Sunnah of the Holy Prophet PBUH. Disaster management may be presented to the world so that the economic and flood crisis might be resolved in Pakistan. This comprehensive research regarding emergence of wealth and Rehabilitation, and its distribution according to the positive manners should be implemented accurately and solution of all the problems in our country may be sought out. Because the Islamic system of justice is a sole comprehensive system which presents the solution of all existing economic issues as well national disaster like recent flood crisis in whole country

The Cost of Unserved Energy: Evidence from Selected Industrial Cities of Pakistan

This study is an attempt to explore the cost of unserved energy due to power outages in Pakistan that started in 2007. The study is based on a survey conducted for four major industrial cities of Punjab—Gujrat, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, and Sialkot. In addition to quantification of output losses, the effect on employment, cost of production, and delay in supply orders are also examined. The output loss is quantified using two-dimensional analyses, controlling for variations in the duration of outages and in the shift hours. The survey data reveal that employment has not suffered any significant drop due to alternative energy arrangements. These arrangements, nevertheless, have increased the production cost of the firms. Delays in the delivery of supply orders are also due to energy shortage. The study reports that the total industrial output loss varies between 12 percent and 37 percent, with Punjab as the major affected province.Energy Crises, Output Loss, Pakistan

Responsivitas Pelayanan Pengaduan Masyarakat Di Kantor Kepolisian Sektor Alla Kabupaten Enrekang

The purpose of this study was to analyze the level of responsiveness of public complaint services at the Alla Sector Police Office, Enrekang Regency. This  study used quantitative  with quantitative descriptive research type, while the number of informants in this study were 63 people. The data collection technique used a questionnaire in the form of a checklist and used descriptive analysis techniques. The results showed that the level of responsiveness of public complaint services at the Alla Sector Police Office in Enrekang Regency, which was measured using indicators  by Zeithaml, which consisted of indicators of responsiveness, accuracy of serving, and punctuality of service, which were in the quite good category, while the speed of serving indicators. , the accuracy of serving and the indicators of the ability to respond to community complaints were in the good category. Keywords: public service, public complaints, responsivenes

Pengaruh Kompensasi Terhadap Kinerja Perawat Honorer Di Rumah Sakit Umum Majene

This study purposed to determine how the views of honorary nurses and patients about the eligibility of receiving compensation for honorary nurses at Majene General Hospital. This type of research used descriptive quantitative method, the population in this study were honorary nurses at the general hospital in the district of Majenene, which amounted to 477 honorary nurses (if the population was smaller than the sample then all were examined (saturated / census sample. This study used three data collection techniques  were observation, questionnaire and documentation, while the data analysis used questionnaire, data presentation and conclusion. The results showed that the effect of work motivation (x) on employee performance (y) based on regression testing found that the H_0 was rejected and  H_1 accepted so that it was found that compensation affects the performance of honorariums in the Majene area general hospital, most agree with the compensation given to nurses to improve the performance of honorary nurses.This study purposed to determine how the views of honorary nurses and patients about the eligibility of receiving compensation for honorary nurses at Majene General Hospital. This type of research used descriptive quantitative method, the population in this study were honorary nurses at the general hospital in the district of Majenene, which amounted to 477 honorary nurses (if the population was smaller than the sample then all were examined (saturated / census sample. This study used three data collection techniques  were observation, questionnaire and documentation, while the data analysis used questionnaire, data presentation and conclusion. The results showed that the effect of work motivation (x) on employee performance (y) based on regression testing found that the H_0 was rejected and  H_1 accepted so that it was found that compensation affects the performance of honorariums in the Majene area general hospital, most agree with the compensation given to nurses to improve the performance of honorary nurses