Remote Exploit of Vista Speech Control 372
An anonymous reader writes "George Ou writes in his blog that he found a remote exploit for the new and shiny Vista Speech Control. Specifically, websites playing soundfiles can trigger arbitrary commands. Ou reports that Microsoft confirmed the bug and suggested as workarounds that either 'A user can turn off their computer speakers and/or microphone'; or, 'If a user does run an audio file that attempts to execute commands on their system, they should close the Windows Media Player, turn off speech recognition, and restart their computer.' Well, who didn't see that coming?"
Most Important Part of the Announcement (Score:5, Funny)
Several lawsuits already involve brutal crimes by computers against annoying young teeny bopper women. Although we can't act like we didn't see this coming, tension has been steadily rising [theonion.com].
Re:Most Important Part of the Announcement (Score:5, Funny)
One of the computer geeks at the Pentagon better not be watching any Star Trek episodes.
or (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Most Important Part of the Announcement (Score:5, Funny)
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There's also a joke about talking too loud near your computer to a colleague named Colin who's asked you which of several designs for a new brochure you prefer - but I can't be bothered to set the scene:
"Format C, Colin"
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billg, ballmer, hardware manufactures, virus writers, anti-virus vendors, spam bot operators, antispam software writers.... oh, you meant *humans*... in that case, none.
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Personally, I'd be VERY happy if it vanished faster than it appeared. Erh... ok, considering the development time that isn't such a strong statement, but I'd be happy if it vanished faster than it installs. Erh... if it vanished faster than it boots. Erh...
Damn, can someone come up with a suitable analogy?
Re:Most Important Part of the Announcement (Score:5, Funny)
Don't believe me? Try it yourself.
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Re:Most Important Part of the Announcement (Score:5, Funny)
Several lawsuits already involve brutal crimes by computers against annoying young teeny bopper women. Although we can't act like we didn't see this coming, tension has been steadily rising [theonion.com].
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Yell Commands Across the Room (Score:5, Funny)
That's hardly an exploit (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking a computer that obeys audio instructions, and playing it some audio instructions, is more of a 'duh' than an 'exploit'. But this problem is a very Good Thing. It can only mean:
-- EITHER people stop yakking on about voice computing, which has been the Way Of The Future since about 1935 or something
-- OR pressure is exerted on web designers to NOT make sites that start making noise the moment the page appears!
Either of these, but especially the latter, would be a big win. So here's to you, Mr. Exploit Finding Man!
Re:That's hardly an exploit (Score:5, Funny)
Now there's a Bud commercial I'd like to hear.
Re:That's hardly an exploit (Score:5, Funny)
Real American Heroes (reaaalllll american heroooessss...)
Today we salute you, Mr Computer Software Exploit Finder (computer software exploit fii-inder)
While others are wasting away their lives drinking, dating, and and having fun, you're hunched over a screen, plowing through code.(hunch plow hunchie plow)
You may not have seen the sun in days, but thats ok- you do this for the greater good.(greaaater goooo-ooodd)
Only YOU could realize that a carefully crafted web favorites icon [microsoft.com] could potentially bring the world to its knees.(Down on its kneeee--eesss)
So crack open an Ice Cold Bud Light, Oh Overload of Overflow, because without you, CmdrTaco would have to get a real job.
Next Mac Ad is even better (Score:5, Funny)
Mac: and I'm a Mac
PC: I have a cool new feature called voice control.
Mac: That is stupid. I have the Time-Machine which let's you recover old documents. Let's say you accidently delete the documents folder
PC: Okay
Mac: To get you documents back, all you have to do is slide the time machine back one minute.
PC: Sounds cool, but cant you just get the documents out of the trash?
Mac: Yes, but it works even if you accidentally empty the recycle bin
Thanks for the inspiration! (Score:4, Funny)
Mac: and I'm a Mac
PC: I have a cool new feature called voice control.
Mac: That is stupid. I've had secure voice control for years
PC: Yes, but with your primitive voice control, the statements had to be in the right format, see?
Mac: OK, but that's why we call it secure. The user has to select a keyword that will trigger the commands.
PC:
Or... (Score:4, Funny)
Mac: And I'm a Mac!
PC: I have a cool new feature called Voice Control!
Mac: FORMAT C!
Re:Next Mac Ad is even better (Score:5, Funny)
PC: Hi, I'm a PC.
Mac: and I'm a Mac.
PC: Now that I run vista, I can accept voice commands!
Mac: Wow, that sounds cool. But what if someone tells you to punch yourself in the face?
PC punches self in the face and nose begins to bleed
PC: Ouch, that hurt!
Mac: I'm sorry PC, I didn't realize that just telling you to do something like "poke yourself in the eye"...
PC pokes finger into his eye
Mac:
PC starts to uncontrollably sneeze, the blood from his nose splattering everywhere
Mac:
PC: groan I'm sorry if I splattered on you.
Mac: That's ok PC, I'm pretty immune to viruses, so I think I'll be alright.
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No, what we need is browsers that will let us force-mute things. What needs this more than anything else? Flash Player., since I think most browser has a "no audio" option anyway.
Re:That's hardly an exploit (Score:5, Informative)
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If that's true, then that's awesome. I remember a couple years ago reading a story on slashdot about various experimental usability projects going on at Microsoft and this was one of them. I think they e
Re:That's hardly an exploit (Score:4, Informative)
mkdir
bind
run_noisy_application
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Re:That's hardly an exploit (Score:5, Insightful)
There has never been any sound from a webpage that didn't make me want to immediately beat the person who wrote it with his own leg. I don't want to listen to your stupid MIDI file of whatever the fsck you think is cool on your web page.
There was never any good reason to embed sounds in web pages unless you have to click a button to specifically play it.
Cheers
Re:That's hardly an exploit (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm feeling anal today, so ... (Score:5, Insightful)
An exploit is, by definition, a successful manipulation of a bug/omission/hole/whatever in a computer system to make it perform something that it was not designed to do. Usually this term is only applied when said action is harmful or potentially harmful.
What is being described here is the possibility of controlling the voice recognition system in Vista remotely to make it perform potentially harmful tasks. Furthermore, this functionality is not something that said system was designed to do; it was only designed to accept commands via microphone.
Therefore, what is being described here is an exploit.
Q.E.D.
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Yes: for all of you fanbois out there saying "Oh, that's not an exploit!" pay attention to what the parent is saying! You gotta admit, it was huge oversight on Microsoft's part to not include any mechanism for turning off the accepting of audio instructions while playing audio, or at least to have a user-configurable option for protection against this exploit, defaulted to "On".
This is yet another case of Microsoft putting ease-of-use a
Re:That's hardly an exploit (Score:4, Interesting)
Mind you this won't stop your roommate from yelling "Shut Down...Yes" just to piss you off. Or worse yet the guy you just fired yelling something more destructive on his way out of the office.
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Couldn't the system simply have a filter that removes the wave signature of what it is outputting before processing input as a command? This is relatively simple technology, as compared to voice recognition itself. You might have to re-calibrate if you move your speakers but I would think that is a small price to pay to not leave open the ability for a web site to control your system through an auto-playing wave file.
The quick answer is "no." Even though the computer knows what waveform it is playing, i
I tried to replicate the bug, but all I got was (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I tried to replicate the bug, but all I got was (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I tried to replicate the bug, but all I got was (Score:5, Funny)
amusing, but not much else (Score:3, Insightful)
Admitedly all I can think of is the Dilbert cartoon with Wally getting ticked at Dilbert having voice driven software.
Bug? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Real Agenda of this Article? (Score:4, Insightful)
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After all, training voice recognition software is long, tedius, and often pointless. The best thing I ever did with one was intentionaly training it horribly (readign something else instead of the text they gave me), and then seeing what would happen. (It wasn't all that interesting in all honesty)
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Anyway, the problem's not with the recogniser so much as how Microsoft's integrated it into the OS. You'd think they would have learned by now, but it seems they're still putting the user's convenience before sensible secu
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"All voice recognition software, no matter what platform, would suffer from this supposed "exploit". So why this article on Vista specifically? What is the real agenda here? Also, if the voice recognition software is trained for a specific user's voice, the chances of an exploit are reduced."
Yup, this is an old one. There's an apocryphal tale of a user group meeting from long ago of a vendor demonstrating voice-control software and a smart aleck in the back of the room yelling "DEL *.*!" (or whatever th
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Really? How do I get a shell prompt on a Mac with root access without typing my password?
I notice he hasn't responded to this. I'm thinking it's because, well, there isn't an easy way to do it. In fact, I can't think of a _hard_ way to do it. Maybe an SUID script to open it as root, but then you have the display thing to deal with. Hm... more likely he was just talking out his arse.
Re:The Real Agenda of this Article? (Score:5, Informative)
All voice recognition software, no matter what platform, would suffer from this supposed "exploit". So why this article on Vista specifically?
This is untrue. Speech recognition software can be made to filter out anything coming in the mic that matches something going out the speaker channel. More simply, you can simply require all commands be preceded with an arbitrary word (like the computer's name). Call you computer "George" and then issue the command "George, kill dash nine star dot star." As opposed to "kill dash nine star dot star." Since the exploit writer won't know to include "George" their exploit fails almost all the time. This was a feature of MacOS 7, more than a decade ago, as I mentioned elsewhere.
Also, if the voice recognition software is trained for a specific user's voice, the chances of an exploit are reduced.
Depending upon the tolerance, this is entirely possible, but I don't see it as being as important or versatile as the other two methods I listed above. MS should have learned from the example of others.
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For instance, the mic may not pick up any of the low frequencies due to location of a subwoofer, quality of speakers, sound absorbers (carpet,
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However, this should be a solvable problem with current DSP technology.
If my cellular telephone can perform realtime echo cancellation, and subtract its own speakerphone audio from the microphone audio, and do it for several hours at a time on a battery the size of a matchbook, then I can only fucking hope that a modern dual-core machine would be able to tackle the task handily.
Even after the variables are all multiplied by some factor because the speakers might move relative to the microphone, the
Re:The Real Agenda of this Article? (Score:4, Funny)
Bob: "Bob go jump off a bridge"
Bob: "Who said that ?"
Bob: "I said that. Now jump!"
Bob: "Ok.. Aaaaaaaagh!"
Stupid.
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Nothing destructive is enabled by default: the worst you can do on a Mac is log yourself out, but that will keep everything running as it was before.
If you go to the Speech control panel you can, after putting your admin password in, e
Filtering? (Score:3, Informative)
Ever used a program such as skype or other voice-chat software? Notice when you have speakers and microphone on, you generally don't hear your voice constantly repeating into echoes (if echo-cancel is on, of course). Notice that you don't with the speakerphone on your cell either? That's because the software/hardware is smart enough to take the audio output and subtract/prevent it from entering the audio input (avoiding feedback loops etc). If used properly with voic
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I've seen EXPENSIVE noise canceling speakerphones screw this up.
Format (Score:3, Funny)
I'm waiting for the audio exploit that responds to (Score:3, Funny)
A Whole Decade of Nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
More than ten years ago I was playing with the speech recognition software that shipped with MacOS 7 or something and I though being able to check my e-mail without getting out of bed was pretty cool. At the time I wrote something about the technology and predicted that speech activated commands would never take off until: 1, most audio people listened to was controlled by the computer, and 2, the computer was smart enough to filter out the sounds it was emitting before processing commands. At the time a lot of people listened to music from their computer and I imagine many still do. Why can't the computer ignore all that sound? It knows it is outputting it so why not filter it? It is sad that the same missing feature is still a problem, so many years later.
Re:A Whole Decade of Nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
The sound that is output by the computer sounds similar to us when re-received through the mic and played back, but to the computer it's a totally alien waveform. A lot of distortion happens between when the computer sends a digital signal to the sound card and when it receives an analog signal from your microphone - so basically, the computer may know what it's playing, but it has very little idea how it'll sound when it reaches the mic.
There are advanced filters and algorithms that can try to match and isolate particular patterns and "sounds" within a waveform, but they're not nearly as powerful as CSI would have us believe, and they also require far too much computing power to be run in realtime.
Of course, the obvious low-tech solution to this issue is to wear headphones, as people in recording studios have for decades.
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There's An Even Simpler Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A Whole Decade of Nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Most simple schemes people come up with to address this are perfectly doable with a free sound program. Play some music, record the area while you're playing the music, then try your great idea. Like, you might think you can start out with inverting the source file and feeding it into the recording with a delay and modified amplitude. If you're really curious about this problem, this is a better way to learn about the difficulties then reading people on the internet, as, in my experience, you're quite likely to be skeptical about the explanations anyhow. The best (and in some sense, only true) explanations involve a lot of math.
I can offer you this meta-rule, though: If it were so easy, it would already have been done. Many things that I see people posting on Slashdot about "Why don't they just do this thing?" are covered by this rule.
So.... (Score:2)
this makes for some fun sound files (Score:2, Funny)
Vista: "Do you want to reformat your hard drive?"
website sound: "All your base are belong to us"
Vista: "Are you sure you want to reformat?"
website sound: "All your base are belong to us"
Vista: "Reformatting.........."
Shit... (Score:5, Funny)
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"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
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"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
Nothing new here (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, no need to panic... (Score:4, Informative)
"Microsoft has said that even if the machine was primed to accept voice commands it would be unlikely the user would not be in the room to hear the file with malicious instructions being played."
Yeah, nobody ever leaves their computer unattended.
And of course, it would be completely impossible for a Trojan to pipe appropriate sounds directly to the input buffer of the sound hardware, thus negating the need for it to be played through your speakers at all. As we all know, Windows is completely watertight against that sort of thing.
This raises an interesting possibility, though - what if you could confuse the recogniser itself into making false positives? You could, for example, persuade it to recognise silence as a command of your choosing.
Best way round this is probably to prevent people doing potentially destructive operations via voice commands. But if this isn't suitable, you could employ clever confirmation strategies, like "If you're sure you want to delete c:\windows, please say the following words..." with the words in question being drawn from a dictionary. No malware could anticipate the sequence (although I suppose you could set the recogniser to work against itself, by playing the text-to-speech engine's own output back to it and triggering recognition).
Hmm. Promises to be quite fun, this.
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By which I mean, if there's a vulnerability, exploiting it's as good as exploiting any other. Microsoft have spent a lot of time closing a lot of back doors in Vista, but this just opens up a great big new one.
howto for Mac users (Score:5, Informative)
$ echo "format sea slash you" | say -o evil.aiff
This makes your messages with a nice, clear, even voice--wouldn't want a bunch of 'um's and 'ah's borking up your exploit, now would you.
`man say` for more options.
Fraternity Fun (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty Silly (Score:2)
First of all, as was mentioned in the article, voice recognition cannot bypass User Account Control. So that immediately limits damage to the local profile.
Second, the user would see all of this happening and would have to remain silent for this to work. It's not like a piece of code executing. The commands are not particularly speedy. They would see dialogs flashing, hear the commands being spoken,
auto refresh (Score:2)
Many users open a web page and walk away.
Time for that hit song, "Format Sea" (Score:2)
Every should know. (Score:2)
Yakking (Score:2)
(Or yacking for those who prefer the alternate spelling)
We've been waiting for this (and joking about it) (Score:5, Funny)
"FORMAT DRIVE C! CONFIRM!".
Instant fun.
Makes me feel all soft and gooshy inside just thinking of it.
Predictions from the past ... (Score:5, Funny)
What about UAC (Score:2)
All right! (Score:2)
Man, now I can't wait for the wide business adoption of vista. That would be the beginning of a new era in the history of office spanking.
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this is HYSTERICAL (Score:2)
It's been said that the only secure computer is one that has been unplugged, encased in cement, and thrown in the ocean. I didn't know MS was planning to make this their official support policy. "Security flaws? No problem. Just DON'T USE IT AT ALL."
Wow, they're good.
Shocked! (Score:3, Funny)
Best. Prank. Ever. (Score:4, Funny)
Watch people panic at their keyboards. Listen to their gasps as the hard disk spins down and their monitors cut off, at which point they all stare at you. Wave. And then run.
Bah... (Score:5, Funny)
"Start Internet Explorer"
"Go aytch tee tee pee colon slash slash gee oh ay tee ess ee dot see ex"
Brrr...
MS Security Response Blog: Adrian responds (Score:5, Informative)
Issue regarding Windows Vista Speech Recognition
Hey everyone this is Adrian and I am writing to try and clear up some concerns regarding a recently reported vulnerability in the Speech Recognition feature of Windows Vista. An issue has been identified publicly where an attacker could use the speech recognition capability of Windows Vista to cause the system to take undesired actions. While it is technically possible, there are some things that should be considered when trying to determine what the threat of exposure is to your Windows Vista system.
He goes on to list reasons why this is not a major issue. The first being that voice commands have to be turned on and configured for this to work.
He ends with
While we are taking the reports seriously and investigating them accordingly I am confident in saying that there is little if any need to worry about the effects of this issue on your new Windows Vista installation.
I think he's right. If this was a serious problem, the MacOS and OS/2 "exploits" mentioned above would've received a lot more press. Still, I expect in a future version, the voice software will be smart enough to ignore the computer's own output.
Personally, I don't like voice commands. They are necessary for users with certain impairments and useful for certain applications such as kiosks, but they are counterproductive in a shared-office environment and just plain weird on my desktop. Even on Star Trek - The Next Generation much of the computer input was via control consoles not voice.
Brilliant! (Score:3, Insightful)
Startup Sound (Score:5, Interesting)
Prior art (Score:5, Funny)
Last year, out in California, at a PC users group, there was a demo of
smart speech recognition software.
Before the demonstrator could begin his demo, a voice called out from the
audience:
"Format c, return."
"Yes, return."
Damned short demo, it was.
You'll know your company is now a botnet... (Score:5, Funny)
Speech Researcher Here Confirms It (Score:4, Interesting)
Saying it is unfixable is a copout (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem of course is that the computer next to you might suffer from the exploit since it doesn't know what sound your computer is generating, though this might be diminished by subtracting other sound to some extent via sidepointing mics or even better by just refusing to do dangerous commands like format or delete via voice recognition in the first place. There are gray areas that probably make total safety impossible but some common sense things including disabling all recognition during sound generation from explorer and wmp sound like a good place to start.
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A good way to fix this would be to make the user hold down a button or buttons (like maybe WinKey+Space or both mouse buttons). Then it doesn't work without you meaning to put in a command.
If you're pushing a button, you can just type the command and it will be faster. No, this problem was solved long ago. In MacOS 7, the built in speech recognition had the option that it only listened to commands preceded by an arbitrary word. I believe the default was, "computer, open slashdot" as opposed to "open slas
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Kind of defeats the purpose of voice command though doesn't it?
We WANT those who are physically handicapped to be able to use the intarntet, eh?
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I guess you never saw a room with more than one computer in it.
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Mostly this will attack single users of single computers in their homes and offices. That threat can be mitigated in the single OS instance. There are other threats like the one you imply, but that's no reason not to fix the biggest one that is easier to dea
Maybe a good start, but not that easy (Score:3, Insightful)
I imagine it's not quite so straightforward. You'd need to take into account room acoustics, hardware effects, generic ambient noises, or even other interfering sounds in the same room that could all interfere with a comparison of outgoing sound to incoming sound. It's very rare that you'd ever have a time where your outgoing sound file exactly matches one that is sensed coming from the speaker
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If Windows came with a canister of gasoline and a lighter, then yes, there should.
It's a bit like with ActiveX: letting any website to execute arbitrary code in your machine is a bad idea, no matter what the underlaying OS. But only Windows does it by default.
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It's not necessary to restart the PC to turn off speech recognition - just say "stop listening" or click on the always visible recognition toolbar to turn the microphone off. It's also not on by default either, and only those interested in it will find it anyway. Not really an "exploit" that's actually exploitable.
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1. Ran the voice command option and configured it as apple suggests.
2. Made sure that the voice command understood my command by issuing several and getting the correct replys back from the system.
3. Recorded the command "What time is it?"
4. Played back the command with voice commands on.
The mac did not re
"Hi, I'm a Mac..." (Score:3, Funny)
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Yes.