March 28th, 2019

The SpeechXRays consortium organized in partnership with the Association of Physics Students of University of Bucharest the SpeechXRays Spoofing Challenge, which ended with a public event on March 28th, at the National Physics Library in Magurele, Ilfov County, Romania. The event on March 28th was dedicated to live presentations of the best spoofing strategies, given by the five finalists, namely Denis Nichita, Sebastian Micluta-Campeanu, Alexandra Serban, Alexandru Michire, and Luca Mihailescu, all students of the Faculty of Physics University of Bucharest. The jury had the difficult task of choosing the recipient of the Best Spoofing Award, as no challenger was able to completely spoof the system, i.e., both voice and imagine, but decided that the Best Spoofing Award should go to Denis Nichita. The other participants were each awarded a Honorable Mention. The jury of the SpeechXRays Spoofing Challenge was presided over by Claude BAUZOU (coordinator of the SpeechXRays project), who noticed "the creativity of the students. They tried miscellaneous ways of cracking the system and with the restricted time they had, they were able to get partial access on voice only or face only into the system. They also made tremendous efforts to understand how the system works and (sometimes beyond the rules of the games) developed strategies to find out how the spoofing counter measures were engineered. It was an interesting demonstration of scientific thinking at work. They spend the morning explaining to us what they did, and yes, indeed, we, the SpeechXRays team, really learned what a malicious person could think of when he or she wants to spoof the system. What stoke me was how techno fansthe students were as compared to the old school defrauders I was imagining. While I would have personally printed an image, made holes to have moving eyes and lips, and put it over my own face, they looked for fancy 3D face generation models based on neural networks on the internet […] ultimately I was also happy to see that they were not able to spoof the system within the very restrictive bounds we set on the contest. Listening to what they did, I am convinced however that if we had relaxed some of the constraints they would have finally succeeded."

The event was broadcasted live on YouTube (click here for the recording) and was covered by EduPedu.ro, the main Romanian news portal on research and education (click here and here for the two articles).