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SkillDetective: Automated Policy-Violation Detection of Voice Assistant Applications in the Wild

  • Jeffrey Young
  • , Song Liao
  • , Long Cheng
  • , Hongxin Hu
  • , Huixing Deng
  • Clemson University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

27 Scopus citations

Abstract

Today's voice personal assistant (VPA) services have been largely expanded by allowing third-party developers to build voice-apps and publish them to marketplaces (e.g., the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant platforms). In an effort to thwart unscrupulous developers, VPA platform providers have specified a set of policy requirements to be adhered to by third-party developers, e.g., personal data collection is not allowed for kid-directed voice-apps. In this work, we aim to identify policy-violating voice-apps in current VPA platforms through a comprehensive dynamic analysis of voice-apps. To this end, we design and develop SKILLDETECTIVE, an interactive testing tool capable of exploring voice-apps' behaviors and identifying possible policy violations in an automated manner. Distinctive from prior works, SKILLDETECTIVE evaluates voice-apps' conformity to 52 different policy requirements in a broader context from multiple sources including textual, image and audio files. With SKILLDETECTIVE, we tested 54,055 Amazon Alexa skills and 5,583 Google Assistant actions, and collected 518,385 textual outputs, approximately 2,070 unique audio files and 31,100 unique images from voice-app interactions. We identified 6,079 skills and 175 actions potentially violating at least one policy requirement.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2022
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages1113-1130
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)9781939133311
StatePublished - 2022
Event31st USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2022 - Boston, United States
Duration: Aug 10 2022Aug 12 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium, Security 2022

Conference

Conference31st USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period08/10/2208/12/22

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