Understanding Privacy Threats in Mycroft Voice Assistant Technology

Voice-assisted technologies are extremely popular; already there are2.5 billionsuch devices in use and that's expected to triple to 8 billion by 2023. This growth appears to be unstoppable—despite theprivacy and security vulnerabilitiesin mainstream voice-assisted technology.

One of these is the "open-window" vulnerability where, for example, a malicious person walks by an open window and shouts, "Hey, unlock the door!" and gains access to the house. Researchers have also identifiedthousands of false-positive wake wordsfor Alexa and Google, potential attack vectors to inject malicious commands. Some people bring up the risk of subsonic commands injected over TV.Amazon may already be using frequency manipulationsto keep Alexa from activating during its commercials. And, as with any web-connected computer device, there's the potential for backdoors and other common vulnerabilities.

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