Greg Kochanski

As speech recognition and synthesis technologies improve, they will be used to access more important, valuable, and private information. Someday your bank will have a dialog system that will allow you to move your money around. Befor that can happen, the interface must be made secure.

Passwords that humans can remember tend to be susceptible to automated attacks. Often they are words in a dictionary, PIN-numbers or names, and can be broken in a few thousand tries from a list of common words.

We propose to make passwords more secure by prohibiting automated attacks with a Reverse Turing Test (RTT). The RTT makes use of the fact that people are far better at understanding distorted speech than are automated speech recognition systems. Using a RTT as a first stage of protection of a dialog system is a good way to keep other people from moving your money into their pockets. [Conference Paper]