Remote Exploit of Vista Speech Control

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?"

Comments

Most Important Part of the Announcement

[eldavojohn]

Microsoft cautioned everyone not to play the song "Hit Me Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears on or near your computer while the mic is on.

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.

Re:Most Important Part of the Announcement

[kannibal_klown]

Worse yet!!!

One of the computer geeks at the Pentagon better not be watching any Star Trek episodes.

Computer. Initiate self destruct sequence. Authorization 1A 2B 3C

Re:Most Important Part of the Announcement

[joshetc]

Microsoft cautioned everyone not to play the song "Hit Me Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears on or near your computer while the mic is on.

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]. You should see what happened to the guy who played the Nirvana song "Rape Me".

Re:Most Important Part of the Announcement

[Anonymous Coward]

Authorization 1A 2B 3C

Hey! That's the authorization code on my luggage!

Re:Most Important Part of the Announcement

[darthnoodles]

I'm guessing they were already raped when Vista was installed.

Re:Most Important Part of the Announcement

[netsharc]

Anyway, typing "format C:" in a running Windows doesn't work, because it will say "The volume is in use." (assuming Windows is on C:)...

Don't believe me? Try it yourself. ;-)

Yell Commands Across the Room

[ehaggis]

Is that a remote exploit?

That's hardly an exploit

[kahei]

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

[just_another_sean]

So here's to you, Mr. Exploit Finding Man!

Now there's a Bud commercial I'd like to hear.

Re:That's hardly an exploit

[gstoddart]

-- 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!

Or, we make browsers so they don't run every damned audio file, flash frigging plugin, executable, movie, or whatever that the idiot who made the site thinks I should hear/see/play with/click/download/execute or whatever.

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

[VertigoAce]

The audio mixer in Vista is no longer based on different audio types (MIDI, CD Audio, WAV, etc). Instead, there is a volume slider and mute button for each application that makes sounds. So you can mute IE, AIM (those annoying video ads), and Windows itself, while still playing your music in WinAmp or WMP.

Re:That's hardly an exploit

[bloobloo]

Never? Not even Bananaphone?

Re:That's hardly an exploit

[xero314]

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.

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.

Re:That's hardly an exploit

[Lanoitarus]

Bud Light Presents...
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 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.

Re:That's hardly an exploit

[DrSkwid]

here's how to do something similar in plan9

mkdir /n/mute
bind /n/mute /dev/audio
run_noisy_application

I tried to replicate the bug, but all I got was

[knightmad]

c:> Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all: Command not found

Re:I tried to replicate the bug, but all I got was

[teslar]

Lucky you. I was watching Star Trek First Contact in the living room and fifteen minutes after Picard told the Enterprise computer to initiate the self-destruct protocol, my laptop exploded!

Re:I tried to replicate the bug, but all I got was

[Overzeetop]

It's not Vista's fault your laptop uses a Sony battery. MS can't be blamed for everything, you know.

Bug?

[drinkypoo]

I wouldn't call it a bug. I'd call it a very bad idea to use a microphone without a switch for voice recognition. Your television could theoretically do things on your computer. Does that sound like a possibility you want to entertain? Get a mic with a switch, or get rooted.

The Real Agenda of this Article?

[ksalter]

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.

Re:The Real Agenda of this Article?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Re:The Real Agenda of this Article?

[billcopc]

Voice control is fine, but having the computer react to its own output is ludicrous! You'd think Vista would be smart enough to recognize feedback... It's like having a retard talking into a mic that's hooked up to his own headphones.

Bob: "Bob go jump off a bridge"
Bob: "Who said that ?"
Bob: "I said that. Now jump!"
Bob: "Ok.. Aaaaaaaagh!"

Stupid.

Format

[jlebrech]

"Open Terminal For Matt See Yes Im sure Reice Tart!!"

A Whole Decade of Nothing

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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

[xappax]

Why can't the computer ignore all that sound? It knows it is outputting it so why not filter it?

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.

Re:A Whole Decade of Nothing

[Jerf]

The easiest answer to this question is, try it.

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.

Shit...

[thousandinone]

I just watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on my machine... this may be my last post.

Nothing new here

[Ruprecht the Monkeyb]

Years ago when I worked in a shop that used OS/2 (one late version of which included speech recognition), we used to play pranks on each other all the time using that 'feature'. Things like changing a startup sound to be two minutes of silence followed by a verbal shutdown command, or changing confirmation prompt sounds to be 'cancel'. Good fun. The random 'select all / delete / yes' was the best, though.

or

[www.sorehands.com]

The geek watching Andromeda. "Fire all missles"

Hey, no need to panic...

[Bertie]

I mean, look:

"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.

howto for Mac users

[sootman]

to create malicious audio files with OS X (10.3 or later), fire up Terminal and use 'say':
$ 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

[Zerth]

If they don't prevent them from running arbitrary commands, you know 5 years in the future that every time term end comes around there will be some naked freshman running through the uni library/labs shouting "quit without saving! yes! reboot! yes! shutdown -h now!"

We've been waiting for this (and joking about it)

[Qbertino]

Me and my friends have been waiting for this and joking about it since IBM Via Voice and Dragon Speak. A whole new era of IT pranks and cyberterrorisim awaits us. Imagine bursting into a room full of PCs and yelling

"FORMAT DRIVE C! CONFIRM!".

Instant fun.
Makes me feel all soft and gooshy inside just thinking of it. :-)

Predictions from the past ...

[Gopal.V]

Userfriendly had predicted the fate of voice recognition six years ago - rm -rf / and yet again !.

Shocked!

[Andrei D]

I am shocked! Damn you Bill, I really believed you when you said Vista is "dramatically more secure than any other operating system released". My world view is turned upside down now :(

Best. Prank. Ever.

[copponex]

Find office with 10 or 15 stations with shiny new copies of Vista. Verify through other means that mics and voice commands are on. Run in, and yell as loud as you can the commands that will shut down the machines. Don't run out yet!

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.

I'm feeling anal today, so ...

[spellraiser]

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.

Bah...

[eno2001]

I expect someone to come up with a site that says:

"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

[davidwr]

Adrian responded to this on the Microsoft Security Response Blog.

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.

Startup Sound

[EricJ2190]

Now I see why Microsoft doesn't want you to change the Vista startup sound.

Prior art

[hweimer]

Time to quote a usenet classic:

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...

[sprior]

When your machine room starts doing a gregorian chant...

Speech Researcher Here Confirms It

[virtigex]

I have worked on both at Apple on PlainTalk and at MS Research on speech. When I was at Apple (around 1996) I poked my head into a co-worker's office who was testing PlainTalk and said loudly "Computer Shut Down". His computer then started shutting down. This "exploit" has been on the Mac since 1996 and nobody seems to have complained about it. I don't think it's a big deal.

Next Mac Ad is even better

[jgc7]

PC: Hi I'm a PC
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

Re:Next Mac Ad is even better

[curunir]

Better yet, the next Mac ad could make light of this exploit.

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: ...or "begin sneezing incesantly"...
        PC starts to uncontrollably sneeze, the blood from his nose splattering everywhere
Mac: ...would make you actually do it.
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.

Thanks for the inspiration!

[Em Adespoton]

PC: Hi I'm a PC
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: ... Mac: I hope he has his XP install CD handy....

Or...

[Greyfox]

PC: Hi! I'm a PC!
Mac: And I'm a Mac!
PC: I have a cool new feature called Voice Control!
Mac: FORMAT C!

Re:More difficult but better...

[wirelessbuzzers]

Am I the only one who thought "Nam-shub of Enki" when I read this?

Yes.