Voice assistant devices can be manipulated with ultrasonic waves

A new type of attack called “SurfingAttack” can be used against voice assistant devices like Siri.

Voice assistants mainly popularized by Apple’s Siri have resulted in great convenience for users. After all, using voice commands, you can do a whole range of things such as playing music, calling someone or even downloading a video from the internet.

However, researchers have in the past revealed how ultrasonic waves that are not audible to the human hearing can be used to control different voice assistant devices including the aforementioned Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby. This is possible even though technically these voice assistants are supposed to recognize the owner’s voice rather than any random voice.

Nonetheless, an emulation can be made possible as seen in the DolphinAttack concept back in 2017 but with a couple of conditions for this type of attack to occur:

There must be a clear line of sight between the device and the ultrasound waves emitter.
The distance should be short between the two.

Adding to this though, in a recent revelation, researchers have demonstrated [PDF] how not only can ultrasound waves be used in this way but they can also be sent through materials with considerable thickness such as a solid piece of glass or even a wooden table. They did so by attaching a piezoelectric disc at the bottom of the surface on which the smartphone was placed.

voice assistant devices manipulated ultrasonic waves