VoiceLive: A phoneme localization based liveness detection for voice authentication on smartphones

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 practical liveness detection system for 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, with the phone closely placed to a user's mouth, it captures 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). Results also show that VoiceLive is robust to different phone placements and is compatible to different sampling rates and phone models.