CAREER: Ensuring Privacy, Inclusiveness, and Policy Compliance in the Era of Voice Personal Assistants

职业：确保语音个人助理时代的隐私、包容性和政策合规性

• 批准号: 2239605
• 负责人: Long Cheng
• 金额: $ 50.25万
• 依托单位: Clemson University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2028-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2239605&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Ensuring; Privacy; Inclusiveness; Policy

Voice personal assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are rapidly gaining in both domestic and business popularity. Despite many convenient features they provide, concerns have been raised about the security and privacy, and content safety related risks to end users they also pose. During the interaction with voice assistants, users expect the voice assistants to fulfill their requests without compromising the privacy or being exposed to unsafe content, and without experiencing racial or gender disparities in terms of the automated speech recognition. The project’s novelties are new techniques and mechanisms to ensure privacy, inclusiveness, and policy compliance in voice assistant systems. The project's broader significance and importance include 1) increasing general awareness of cybersecurity in the K-12 community through various outreach and educational activities; 2) training the next generation of cybersecurity researchers especially underrepresented and minorities; and 3) strengthening cybersecurity education by developing new course materials and hands-on labs.This project first develops a voice-based privacy notice mechanism to enable users (in particular, visually impaired users) to make informed privacy decisions through the voice channel. It creates a new paradigm for accessible and inclusive privacy notification. This project then proposes a machine learning-based dynamic analysis framework, which allows a systematic evaluation of policy compliance and social biases in voice assistant systems. It can be used by users to check for any privacy or content safety violations in voice applications, and can potentially aid government agencies to perform a large-scale investigation into the policy compliance practices of existing voice applications in the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant platforms. Finally, this project develops static analysis techniques to assist developers in producing policy-compliant voice applications at the development phase. This project also integrates a comprehensive education and outreach plan with the proposed research to train the next generation of cybersecurity researchers in an interdisciplinary environment, and to attract more students from underrepresented groups into the cybersecurity field.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Amazon Alexa和Google Assistant等语音个人助理在国内和企业中都迅速获得。尽管他们提供了许多方便的功能，但人们对安全性和隐私以及对最终用户也提出的风险提出了担忧。在与语音助手的互动过程中，用户期望语音助手在不损害隐私或暴露于不安全内容的情况下满足他们的要求，而没有经验的赛车或性别分布，就自动化的语音识别而言。该项目的新颖性是确保语音助理系统中隐私，包容性和政策合规性的新技术和机制。该项目的更广泛的意义和重要性包括1）通过各种宣传和教育活动提高K-12社区网络安全的普遍认识； 2）培训下一代网络安全研究人员，特别是人为不足和少数群体； 3）通过开发新的课程材料和动手实验室来加强网络安全教育。该项目首先开发了一种基于语音的隐私通知机制，以使用户（尤其是视力障碍用户）通过语音渠道做出明智的隐私决策。它为可访问和包容性的隐私通知创建了一个新的范式。然后，该项目提出了一个基于机器学习的动态分析框架，该框架允许对语音助手系统中的策略合规性和社会偏见进行系统评估。用户可以使用它来检查语音应用中的任何隐私或内容安全违规行为，并有可能帮助政府机构对Amazon Alexa和Google Assistant Platforms中现有语音应用程序的政策合规性实践进行大规模投资。最后，该项目开发了静态分析技术，以帮助开发人员在开发阶段生产符合政策的语音应用程序。 This project also integrates a comprehensive education and outreach plan with the proposed research to train the next generation of cybersecurity researchers in an interdisciplinary environment, and to attract more students from underrepresented groups into the cybersecurity field.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed precious of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.