Your Voice is Your New ID Invisible Biometrics:

My voice is now worth money it seems Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords. If two voiceprints are similar enough, the system declares them a match. where could all this go wrong

Barclays PLC recently experimented with voiceprinting as an identification for its wealthiest clients. It was so successful that Barclays is rolling it out to the rest of its 12 million retail banking customers.

in the next two or three years this tech is expected to be rolled out as standard

Other major companies and governments cited as users - or soon to be users - of this technology include:

Wells Fargo: Over 70 million customers.
Canada's TD Bank Group: 22 million customers worldwide.

The National Australia Bank Ltd. and The Bank of New Zealand: part of a conglomerate which has 12 million customers total.

New Zealand's Internal Revenue Department: 1 million people have been logged and databased by their voice.

Vanguard Mutual Fund: tens of thousands of customers speak the phrase "my voice is my password."

Mobile phone company Turkcell: 10 million Turkish customers are identified by their voice.

South Africa: 7 million people are identified by voice in order to prove the validity of Social Security payments.

An Israeli company, FST21, is using voice biometrics to secure everything from apartment complexes to airports. Voice recognition in conjunction with other biometric techniques now screens those who show up at the door of New York City's Knickerbocker Village.


phys.org...

phys.org...
www.activistpost.com...

The next time you have a sore throat from shouting at the kids have the cold/or the flu or maybe stressed think on this
when you cannot get into your bank etc

Nobody seems to recognise my voice when i phone them anybody here have the same problem when you phone someone

That's a good point, my kids laughed at me when I yelled at them after I had my tonsils removed.

What about guys that haven't gotten a deeper voice by 18? They can't bank until they do? There was a time I couldn't tell which sibling answered the phone unless I asked. One is male and one is female!

This seems like a bad idea.

a reply to: Iamthatbish

Yes it seems rather a strange way to do business almost as if we are going backwards with security these days the banks are still running windows xp in the ATM machines and have a usb port hidden they are cutting into to rob , i can see a way to record someone over the phone and use the recording to access the data .

Everyone i phone asks who's that when i call

a reply to: douglas5

Hiya douglas,

I haven't looked through every single reference, but I've done a few things in this area.

On the security side, voice is considered a hard biometric though it does have an error rate, but there is a difference between failing to authenticate and being 'wolfed'. A wolf in a biometric system is someone who can impersonate you, and it's actually quite difficult to do. Your impersonation may get a close match but not a strong enough match to get through the door. Algorithms are also used to prevent false broadcast attacks and these are quite elaborate, so recording you isn't quite that simple. The template of your voice isn't actually stored in the back end in full, and your voice playing from a recording device won't fool the system. You need good equipment to get past a voice authentication or a very rare and friendly 'wolf' ... for a paper password you need a good memory and fingers to push buttons. Edit: to include your example Douglas, using a recording of a phone call to get around good voice authentication would be like taking a photo of a key to open your front door.

Personally I think these services should also be backed up with a password as well so they are extra security not new security, but that's what people do.

Regarding changes in your voice, its been a problem for a while in biometric fields ... there always has to be a way to update your template (your voice in this case) and there also has to be a way to login that doesn't require you to talk. Still, the way we treat passwords, biometrics do provide statistical benefits to companies. You can't 'leave your voice lying around' at least.

The real concern actually relates to things like PRISM and monitoring programs. When you give an organization your voice template you want to make sure they don't store the whole template. They simply should for two reasons.

1. They don't need to store the whole template to authenticate you
2. You don't want your template being given to a government agency or corporate

Imagine phone monitoring programs where I can say ... 'Give me everything Bill has said for two years'. Any phone with your template on it, any skype conversation, any podcast ... you get the idea. Worse still, imagine a street sign hearing your voice and then showing you an advert about something you like. It's repulsive.

I like biometrics. I think they have uses. I don't use any service that demands any of my templates be stored.

a reply to: Pinke

Thank you for the insight Pinke , i can see people scratching their heads trying to get round this system , maybe working in a call center to collect data on someone , what was the error rate you came across with this tech ? during trials

a reply to: douglas5

Hiya again,

The major issues with errors rates depend on factors like length of enrollment sample, hardware, background noises etc but for the most part voice recognition systems at the high end out compete several finger print systems. In tests based entirely off of mobile phone lines and PC microphones error rates could increase from say 0.8% to as much as 5% though it needs to be pointed out that these numbers hold up in the wild unlike some other biometric systems. I've seen an image recognition test for example that went from 10% to over 40%, it's a common joke that image tests often blow out on release.

For the most part though good voice systems hit close to 100% and it has to be remembered that there is more going behind the scenes. Just because 0.2% are false matches it doesn't mean the system is open to malicious intent. The 'wolf' in a wild system would have to know the account number of their doppleganger in most cases. And 0.2% doesn't mean that 0.2% of brute force attempts would work. An impersonator would be dead before they hit the correct voice on an individual account.

There have also been a lot of issues cleaned up such as VOIP encryption in skype being removed, and in a live system voice variations over time are adapted. I mean if you didn't use the system for 20 years, you likely have to enroll in the system again, but if you use the system a lot it has the ability to update your template.

If anything the biggest hurdle isn't error rates, it's user confidence. Due to Hollywood movies the public at large has this idea of how easy biometrics are to fake out. Even infosec professionals constantly say that biometrics are useless. They are speaking from the view point of believing a template to be a password that can never be changed; that limitation is over exaggerated for a number of reasons that would take a while to go into, but the gist is that playback attacks simply aren't as powerful as people think they are - even if you got in it would only happen once.

I'm sure I'll end up on the list of a few ATS persons as a government agent for this post, so I do have to repeat again ... The unencryption of VOIP and the monitoring systems we have in place do mean this is another major invasion of privacy. Its already been happening actually ... we've had commercial vendor systems tracking our movements since the 1990s.

Edit: sorry for the long reply Douglas!

not sure how 'safe' (foolproof) this technology is
check for a story "my captors are treating me well" -(supposed) colin powel

..but they will eventually get us all on something like this under the guise of "wearable tattoo's" or some such

the latest entraining method seems to focus on comedy shows, where the audience member is watched by a camera and charged 30 cents p/laugh (max. $24~$30 total cost)

a reply to: Pinke

Excellent post Pinke i picked up more in there than i would in a massive article written about this technology , that is quite a low failure rate across a mobile network i would expect near 10 % with how bad America/ U.K looks after their mobile networks ,

When a new system of gaming comes out x box 60 / Sony etc the first place on the planet they check to see if it has been broken is not some mad hacker in the far east or Russia but in Glasgow at a market there .

As for the vendor systems tracking us i figured that out the hard way back in the late 90 s with a mobile phone being used to track people down and with chips in our bank cards being triangulated in city centers and facial recognition being more common than some would believe possible

How do you spell nefarious?
N E F A R I O U S
Watch out for this technology...

originally posted by: Pinke
a reply to: douglas5
Imagine phone monitoring programs where I can say ... 'Give me everything Bill has said for two years'. Any phone with your template on it, any skype conversation, any podcast ... you get the idea. Worse still, imagine a street sign hearing your voice and then showing you an advert about something you like. It's repulsive.

I like biometrics. I think they have uses. I don't use any service that demands any of my templates be stored.

I can see pinke has a lot of insight, but i can see shes still being naive...

We're doomed.

originally posted by: funkadeliaaaa
We're doomed.

At least it will be a fun kind of doom.

And thanks douglas!