Using Inaudible Audio and Voice Assistants to Transmit Sensitive Data over Telephony

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how malware can covertly transmit sensitive data through inaudible audio via voice assistants and phone channels, bypassing traditional security defenses.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of data exfiltration using VA-mediated phone calls with inaudible audio encoding, highlighting new security vulnerabilities.

Findings

High accuracy data transmission over short calls

Inaudible audio can be nearly imperceptible to humans

Factors like distance and noise affect transfer rates

Abstract

New security and privacy concerns arise due to the growing popularity of voice assistant (VA) deployments in home and enterprise networks. A number of past research results have demonstrated how malicious actors can use hidden commands to get VAs to perform certain operations even when a person may be in their vicinity. However, such work has not explored how compromised computers that are close to VAs can leverage the phone channel to exfiltrate data with the help of VAs. After characterizing the communication channel that is set up by commanding a VA to make a call to a phone number, we demonstrate how malware can encode data into audio and send it via the phone channel. Such an attack, which can be crafted remotely, at scale and at low cost, can be used to bypass network defenses that may be deployed against leakage of sensitive data. We use Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency tones to encode arbitrary binary data into audio that can be played over computer speakers and sent through a VA mediated phone channel to a remote system. We show that modest amounts of data can be transmitted with high accuracy with a short phone call lasting a few minutes. This can be done while making the audio nearly inaudible for most people by modulating it with a carrier with frequencies that are near the higher end of the human hearing range. Several factors influence the data transfer rate, including the distance between the computer and the VA, the ambient noise that may be present and the frequency of modulating carrier. With the help of a prototype built by us, we experimentally assess the impact of these factors on data transfer rates and transmission accuracy. Our results show that voice assistants in the vicinity of computers can pose new threats to data stored on such computers. These threats are not addressed by traditional host and network defenses. We briefly discuss possible mitigation ways.