Spoofing and countermeasures for speaker verification: A survey

While biometric authentication has advanced significantly in recent years, evidence shows the technology can be susceptible to malicious spoofing attacks. The research community has responded with dedicated countermeasures which aim to detect and deflect such attacks. Even if the literature shows that they can be effective, the problem is far from being solved; biometric systems remain vulnerable to spoofing. Despite a growing momentum to develop spoofing countermeasures for automatic speaker verification, now that the technology has matured sufficiently to support mass deployment in an array of diverse applications, greater effort will be needed in the future to ensure adequate protection against spoofing. This article provides a survey of past work and identifies priority research directions for the future. We summarise previous studies involving impersonation, replay, speech synthesis and voice conversion spoofing attacks and more recent efforts to develop dedicated countermeasures. The survey shows that future research should address the lack of standard datasets and the over-fitting of existing countermeasures to specific, known spoofing attacks.