ChaRVoC: A Challenge-Response Voice Cancelable Authentication System

2026-05-04

AI Summary

This work addresses critical security challenges in speaker verification systems—namely replay attacks, template leakage, and irreversibility—by proposing a three-factor authentication mechanism that integrates voice biometrics, user-memorized secrets, and dynamic challenges. The core innovation lies in the HashGray-XOR scheme, which combines cryptographic hash functions with an irreversible Gray-code-based transformation to achieve mathematically non-invertible, revocable, and unlinkable template protection. Experimental evaluations on the VoxCeleb1, TIMIT, and VOiCES datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches such as WTA, IoM, and RoE in both recognition accuracy and security guarantees.

Abstract

In this work, we present a Challenge-Response Voice Cancelable authentication system, called ChaRVoC, which provides protection against replay attacks, revocability issues, and template compromise. Our approach integrates three security factors: (1) inherent voice biometric characteristics, (2) user-memorized secret keys enabling template revocability, and (3) dynamic system-generated challenges providing liveness detection. Specifically, we introduce a novel HashGray-XOR scheme which combines a cryptographic hash function with an unrecoverable graycode-based transformation to create secured templates that are mathematically proven to be non-invertible. We compare our methods with existing cancelable biometric methods (WTA, IoM, RoE) on VoxCeleb1, TIMIT, and VOiCES datasets to show the recognition performance of our proposed system. We also show that our system achieves both cancelability and unlinkability properties.

Problem

• replay attacks
• revocability
• template compromise
• unlinkability
• cancelable biometrics

Innovation

• Cancelable Biometrics
• Challenge-Response Authentication
• HashGray-XOR
• Liveness Detection
• Voice Biometrics