You Are the Trigger: Speaker-Activated Backdoors
Speech models are increasingly used as an interface to AI systems, from transcription tools to voice agents. Existing audio backdoors require an attacker to introduce triggers at inference time. We study a different threat model in which the attacker compromises the model during fine-tuning but has no access to the victim's inference-time inputs. We introduce the Speaker-Activated Backdoor (SAB) setting, in which a target speaker's natural voice serves as the trigger. We develop a two-phase fine-tuning method that first makes speaker identity more accessible and then binds the target speaker to an attacker-chosen payload. Compared with a one-phase baseline with the same training budget, t...
| Authors | Nataša Krčo, Euodia Dodd, Peter Romov et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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