A Continuous Liveness Detection System for Text-independent Speaker Verification

TL;DR

VoiceLive is a practical, hardware-free liveness detection system for voice authentication on smartphones that leverages stereo recordings and device-user interaction to prevent spoofing, achieving over 99% accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces VoiceLive, a novel smartphone-based liveness detection system utilizing stereo TDoA dynamics and device positioning without extra hardware.

Findings

Achieves over 99% detection accuracy and 1-2% EER.

Robust across different phone positions and angles.

Effective for both text-dependent and text-independent voice verification.

Abstract

Voice authentication is drawing increasing attention and becomes an attractive alternative to passwords for mobile authentication. Recent advances in mobile technology further accelerate the adoption of voice biometrics in an array of diverse mobile applications. However, recent studies show that voice authentication is vulnerable to replay attacks, where an adversary can spoof a voice authentication system using a pre-recorded voice sample collected from the victim. In this paper, we propose VoiceLive, a liveness detection system for both text-dependent and text-independent voice authentication on smartphones. VoiceLive detects a live user by leveraging the user's unique vocal system and the stereo recording of smartphones. In particular, utilizing the built-in gyroscope, loudspeaker, and microphone, VoiceLive first measures the smartphone's distance and angle from the user, then it captures the position-specific time-difference-of-arrival (TDoA) changes in a sequence of phoneme sounds to the two microphones of the phone, and uses such unique TDoA dynamic which doesn't exist under replay attacks for liveness detection. VoiceLive is practical as it doesn't require additional hardware but two-channel stereo recording that is supported by virtually all smartphones. Our experimental evaluation with 12 participants and different types of phones shows that VoiceLive achieves over 99% detection accuracy at around 1% Equal Error Rate (EER) on the text-dependent system and around 99% accuracy and 2% EER on the text-independent one. Results also show that VoiceLive is robust to different phone positions, i.e. the user is free to hold the smartphone with distinct distances and angles.