Communications
Securing Your Voice
Researchers turn voiceprints into passwords to avoid storing your actual speech anywhere.
Voice authentication is increasingly used by tens of millions of people, including bank and telecom customers: you record a sample upon enrollment, and then speak that passage each time you call in, confirming your identity with a certainty regular passwords can't match. But if hackers obtain your voiceprint—under scenarios akin to breaches of credit-card and other personal data—they could use it to break into other systems that use voice authentication.
Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say they've developed voice-verification technology that can transform your voice into a series of password-like data strings, in a process that can be handled on the average smart phone. Your actual voice never leaves your phone, during enrollment or later authentication.
"We are the first to convert a voice recording to something like passwords," says Bhiksha Raj, the CMU computer scientist who led the research. "With fingerprints, this is exactly what is done, but nobody has figured out how to do it with voice until now." The work will be presented as a keynote speech at an information security conference in Passau, Germany next month.
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