Automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems use a playback detector to filter out playback attacks and ensure verification reliability. Since current playback detection models are almost always trained using genuine and played-back speech, it may be possible to degrade their performance by transforming the acoustic characteristics of the played-back speech close to that of the genuine speech. One way to do this is to enhance speech stolen from the target speaker before playback. We tested the effectiveness of a playback attack using this method by using the speech enhancement generative adversarial network to transform acoustic characteristics. Experimental results showed that use of this enhanced stolen speech method significantly increases the equal error rates for the baseline used in the ASVspoof 2017 challenge and for a light convolutional neural network-based method. The results also showed that its use degrades the performance of a Gaussian mixture model-universal background model-based ASV system. This type of attack is thus an urgent problem needing to be solved.
The automatic speaker verification spoofing and countermeasures (ASVspoof) challenge series is a community-led initiative which aims to promote the consideration of spoofing and the development of countermeasures. ASVspoof 2021 is the 4th in a series of bi-annual, competitive challenges where the goal is to develop countermeasures capable of discriminating between bona fide and spoofed or deepfake speech. This document provides a technical description of the ASVspoof 2021 challenge, including details of training, development and evaluation data, metrics, baselines, evaluation rules, submission procedures and the schedule.
High-performance spoofing countermeasure systems for automatic speaker verification (ASV) have been proposed in the ASVspoof 2019 challenge. However, the robustness of such systems under adversarial attacks has not been studied yet. In this paper, we investigate the vulnerability of spoofing countermeasures for ASV under both white-box and black-box adversarial attacks with the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and the projected gradient descent (PGD) method. We implement high-performing countermeasure models in the ASVspoof 2019 challenge and conduct adversarial attacks on them. We compare performance of black-box attacks across spoofing countermeasure models with different network architectures and different amount of model parameters. The experimental results show that all implemented countermeasure models are vulnerable to FGSM and PGD attacks under the scenario of white-box attack. The more dangerous black-box attacks also prove to be effective by the experimental results.
Recent years have seen growing efforts to develop spoofing countermeasures (CMs) to protect automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems from being deceived by manipulated or artificial inputs. The reliability of spoofing CMs is typically gauged using the equal error rate (EER) metric. The primitive EER fails to reflect application requirements and the impact of spoofing and CMs upon ASV and its use as a primary metric in traditional ASV research has long been abandoned in favour of risk-based approaches to assessment. This paper presents several new extensions to the tandem detection cost function (t-DCF), a recent risk-based approach to assess the reliability of spoofing CMs deployed in tandem with an ASV system. Extensions include a simplified version of the t-DCF with fewer parameters, an analysis of a special case for a fixed ASV system, simulations which give original insights into its interpretation and new analyses using the ASVspoof 2019 database. It is hoped that adoption of the t-DCF for the CM assessment will help to foster closer collaboration between the anti-spoofing and ASV research communities.
Whether it be for results summarization, or the analysis of classifier fusion, some means to compare different classifiers can often provide illuminating insight into their behaviour, (dis)similarity or complementarity. We propose a simple method to derive 2D representation from detection scores produced by an arbitrary set of binary classifiers in response to a common dataset. Based upon rank correlations, our method facilitates a visual comparison of classifiers with arbitrary scores and with close relation to receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and detection error trade-off (DET) analyses. While the approach is fully versatile and can be applied to any detection task, we demonstrate the method using scores produced by automatic speaker verification and voice anti-spoofing systems. The former are produced by a Gaussian mixture model system trained with VoxCeleb data whereas the latter stem from submissions to the ASVspoof 2019 challenge.
The ASVspoof challenge series was born to spearhead research in anti-spoofing for automatic speaker verification (ASV). The two challenge editions in 2015 and 2017 involved the assessment of spoofing countermeasures (CMs) in isolation from ASV using an equal error rate (EER) metric. While a strategic approach to assessment at the time, it has certain shortcomings. First, the CM EER is not necessarily a reliable predictor of performance when ASV and CMs are combined. Second, the EER operating point is ill-suited to user authentication applications, e.g. telephone banking, characterised by a high target user prior but a low spoofing attack prior. We aim to migrate from CM- to ASV-centric assessment with the aid of a new tandem detection cost function (t-DCF) metric. It extends the conventional DCF used in ASV research to scenarios involving spoofing attacks. The t-DCF metric has 6 parameters: (i) false alarm and miss costs for both systems, and (ii) prior probabilities of target and spoof trials (with an implied third, nontarget prior). The study is intended to serve as a self-contained, tutorial-like presentation. We analyse with the t-DCF a selection of top-performing CM submissions to the 2015 and 2017 editions of ASVspoof, with a focus on the spoofing attack prior. Whereas there is little to choose between countermeasure systems for lower priors, system rankings derived with the EER and t-DCF show differences for higher priors. We observe some ranking changes. Findings support the adoption of the DCF-based metric into the roadmap for future ASVspoof challenges, and possibly for other biometric anti-spoofing evaluations.