“Is this my president speaking?” Tamper-proofing Speech in Live Recordings

Abstract

Malicious editing of audiovisual content has emerged as a popular tool for targeted defamation, spreading disinformation, and triggering political unrest. Public speeches and statements of political leaders, public figures, or celebrities are particularly at target due to their effectiveness in influencing the masses. Ubiquitous audiovisual recording of live speeches with smart devices and unrestricted content sharing and redistributing on social media make it difficult to address this threat using existing authentication techniques. Given public recordings of live events lack source control over the media, standard solutions falter. This paper presents TalkLock, a speech integrity verification system that can enable live speakers to protect their speeches from malicious alterations even when the speech is recorded by any member of the audience. The core idea is to generate meta-information from the speech signal in real-time and disseminate it through a secure QR code-based screen-camera communication. The QR code when recorded along with the speech embeds the meta-information in the content and it can be used later for independent verification in stand-alone applications or online platforms. A user study with live speech and real-world experiments with different types of voices, languages, environments, and distances show that TalkLock can verify fake content with 94.4% accuracy.