MASTERKEY: Practical Backdoor Attack Against Speaker Verification
  Systems
Hanqing Guo Xun Chen Junfeng Guo Li Xiao Qiben Yan
Speaker Verification (SV) is widely deployed in mobile systems to
authenticate legitimate users by using their voice traits. In this work, we
propose a backdoor attack MASTERKEY, to compromise the SV models. Different
from previous attacks, we focus on a real-world practical setting where the
attacker possesses no knowledge of the intended victim. To design MASTERKEY, we
investigate the limitation of existing poisoning attacks against unseen
targets. Then, we optimize a universal backdoor that is capable of attacking
arbitrary targets. Next, we embed the speaker's characteristics and semantics
information into the backdoor, making it imperceptible. Finally, we estimate
the channel distortion and integrate it into the backdoor. We validate our
attack on 6 popular SV models. Specifically, we poison a total of 53 models and
use our trigger to attack 16,430 enrolled speakers, composed of 310 target
speakers enrolled in 53 poisoned models. Our attack achieves 100% attack
success rate with a 15% poison rate. By decreasing the poison rate to 3%, the
attack success rate remains around 50%. We validate our attack in 3 real-world
scenarios and successfully demonstrate the attack through both over-the-air and
over-the-telephony-line scenarios.