arXiv subjects

Matthew Wallace

Publications and source records attributed to Matthew Wallace.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

SkillFence: A Systems Approach to Practically Mitigating Voice-Based Confusion Attacks

Voice assistants are deployed widely and provide useful functionality. However, recent work has shown that commercial systems like Amazon Alexa and Google Home are vulnerable to voice-based confusion attacks that exploit design issues. We propose a systems-oriented defense against this class of attacks and demonstrate its functionality for Amazon Alexa. We ensure that only the skills a user intends execute in response to voice commands. Our key insight is that we can interpret a user's intentions by analyzing their activity on counterpart systems of the web and smartphones. For example, the Lyft ride-sharing Alexa skill has an Android app and a website. Our work shows how information from counterpart apps can help reduce dis-ambiguities in the skill invocation process. We build SkilIFence, a browser extension that existing voice assistant users can install to ensure that only legitimate skills run in response to their commands. Using real user data from MTurk (N = 116) and experimental trials involving synthetic and organic speech, we show that SkillFence provides a balance between usability and security by securing 90.83% of skills that a user will need with a False acceptance rate of 19.83%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2016

Exact discretization of harmonic tensors

Lyons and Sullivan have shown how to discretize harmonic functions on a Riemannian manifold $M$ whose Brownian motion satisfies a certain recurrence property called $\ast$-recurrence. We study analogues of this discretization for tensor fields which are harmonic in the sense of the covariant Laplacian. We show that, under certain restrictions on the holonomy of the connection, the lifted diffusion on the orthonormal frame bundle has the same $\ast$-recurrence property as the original Brownian motion. This observation permits us to reduce to the discretization of ordinary harmonic functions by a device called scalarization.

math.DG↗

arXiv2015

Explicit formulas for reaction probability in reaction-diffusion experiments

A computational procedure is developed for determining the conversion probability for reaction-diffusion systems in which a first-order catalytic reaction is performed over active particles. We apply this general method to systems on metric graphs, which may be viewed as 1-dimensional approximations of 3-dimensional systems, and obtain explicit formulas for conversion. We then study numerically a class of 3-dimensional systems and test how accurately they are described by model formulas obtained for metric graphs. The optimal arrangement of active particles in a 1-dimensional multiparticle system is found, which is shown to depend on the level of catalytic activity: conversion is maximized for low catalytic activity when all particles are bunched together close to the point of gas injection, and for high catalytic activity when the particles are evenly spaced.

cond-mat.soft↗