Detecting Voice Cloning Attacks via Timbre Watermarking (2312.03410v1)

Abstract: Nowadays, it is common to release audio content to the public. However, with the rise of voice cloning technology, attackers have the potential to easily impersonate a specific person by utilizing his publicly released audio without any permission. Therefore, it becomes significant to detect any potential misuse of the released audio content and protect its timbre from being impersonated. To this end, we introduce a novel concept, "Timbre Watermarking", which embeds watermark information into the target individual's speech, eventually defeating the voice cloning attacks. To ensure the watermark is robust to the voice cloning model's learning process, we design an end-to-end voice cloning-resistant detection framework. The core idea of our solution is to embed and extract the watermark in the frequency domain in a temporally invariant manner. To acquire generalization across different voice cloning attacks, we modulate their shared process and integrate it into our framework as a distortion layer. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed timbre watermarking can defend against different voice cloning attacks, exhibit strong resistance against various adaptive attacks (e.g., reconstruction-based removal attacks, watermark overwriting attacks), and achieve practicality in real-world services such as PaddleSpeech, Voice-Cloning-App, and so-vits-svc. In addition, ablation studies are also conducted to verify the effectiveness of our design. Some audio samples are available at https://timbrewatermarking.github.io/samples.

• The paper presents an end-to-end timbre watermarking framework that embeds robust, invisible markers in audio to detect and counteract voice cloning attacks.
• It employs a distortion layer and frequency-domain embedding to maintain watermark integrity across diverse, adaptive cloning methods.
• Experimental validations and ablation studies confirm its effectiveness in real-world applications like PaddleSpeech, Voice-Cloning-App, and so-vits-svc.

The paper "Detecting Voice Cloning Attacks via Timbre Watermarking" addresses the growing concern of voice cloning attacks, where attackers can impersonate an individual by leveraging their publicly released audio. The authors propose a solution named "Timbre Watermarking" to counteract such threats.

Timbre Watermarking Concept: This technique involves embedding watermark information into an individual's speech to protect it from unauthorized voice cloning. The watermark is designed to be robust against the learning processes of voice cloning models, ensuring that the integrity of the original speaker's voice is maintained even when subjected to such attacks.

Framework Design: The authors present an end-to-end framework resistant to voice cloning. The framework operates by embedding and extracting the watermark in the frequency domain, doing so in a manner that remains consistent over time. This approach helps maintain generalization across various types of voice cloning attacks.

Distortion Layer Integration: To enhance the framework's robustness, a distortion layer is integrated. This layer simulates the shared processes of voice cloning attacks, helping the system modulate and counteract them effectively.

Experimental Validation: The paper includes experiments demonstrating that timbre watermarking successfully defends against diverse voice cloning attacks. The system shows strong resistance to several adaptive attack strategies, such as reconstruction-based removal attacks and watermark overwriting attacks.

Practical Application: The proposed solution is evaluated for its practicality, showing effectiveness in real-world applications like PaddleSpeech, Voice-Cloning-App, and so-vits-svc.

Ablation Studies: The authors perform ablation studies to further confirm the effectiveness of their method, ensuring that each component of the watermarking design contributes to enhancing the system's robustness.

Overall, the research presents a promising approach to safeguarding audio content against unauthorized use and cloning, with practical implications in various speech-related services. Audio samples demonstrating the effectiveness of timbre watermarking are made available by the authors online for further reference.