back to article When you play this song backwards, you can hear Satan. Play it forwards, and it hijacks Siri, Alexa

Computer science boffins affiliated with IBM and universities in China and the United States have devised a way to issue covert commands to voice-based AI software – like Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana – by encoding them in popular songs. They refer to these tweaked tunes, which issue mostly …

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  1. Captain Scarlet Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Echo, open the front door.

    What people install "smart" locks now as well, I assume all you need to do is yell loud enough so said device can hear?

  2. EveryTime

    We need a checkbox response for "security hacks".

    This one would be "You construct your own (flawed) system that you claim is similar to the original, and hack that, never proving the hack works on the readily-available original."

    Neural networks are inherently untrustworthy. It's trivial to train a bad one that superficially appears to work. There are many stories of NNs that were later found to be deeply flawed. One was a tank / APC image recognition that was dramatically 'better' than humans, spotting tanks that were expertly concealed. It turned out that it was classifying road ruts as positives, not armored vehicles.

    There are now tools that help visualize intermediate node responses on specific types of Tensorflow networks. But that's a tiny fraction of the systems, you need to be an expert to understand what you are seeing, and it only works for images. It's actually more directly useful for figuring out the system is flawed than improving it (although one can lead to the other). But note that it requires access to the intermediate nodes -- which isn't known to the end user with the cloud processing of Alexa and the like.

  3. The Bionic Man

    Now Justin Beiber can do to Alexa what he's been doing to my poor ears.

  4. wayne 8

    Not just Alexa

    Hijack a vehicle's satellite radio receiver and deliver a song with a payload to a self driving vehicle's processor.

  5. Oengus

    I wonder

    I wonder what playing Billy Joel's song "Downeaster Alexa" would do...

    or what would happen in the Joel household if Billy was calling his daughter...

  6. ronspencer314

    Miranda

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXCaF68sDPU

  7. Andy 97

    An ad exec’s dream!

    There was a time in Blighty where HMG had to ban subliminal messaging in cinema and broadcast media.

    All an of our ad execs would need to do is to hide some nonsense about product/service at the end of the ad and hey presto, your slimline plastic friend will ask you if you want to know more.

    Ofcom has better get their regulation head on...

  8. Phukov Andigh Bronze badge

    Finally!

    a technological reason to tell the youth to "turn that sh*te down!"

    I wonder how long until "pirated" audio or video tracks start "phoning home"?

    Phishing with music files "traded" amongst associates?

    with some of the craptacular techno modified stuff out there, would one ever know till it was too late?

  9. fidodogbreath

    It's only a matter of time before there are web sites where you can select an audio file, type in your desired command, select a target device type, and then download your custom attack. Then the real fun begins.

    Alexa, set the temperature to 40 C

    OK Google, open the garage door. OK Google, close the garage door.

    Siri, show all the pics in the folder named private on the TV

    Etc.

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