VoxGrid: a mobile voice verification system

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce VoxGrid, a mobile voice verification system intended for improving the security of the username‐password authentication scheme.Design/methodology/approachThe system incorporates text‐dependant speaker verification via mobile devices that provides for a three‐factor authentication scheme for granting authorised access to certain websites or applications. The same speech recognition engine used by Google Voice Search is utilised to provide voice‐to‐text feature. All verification tasks are performed on a centralised server to minimise computing requirements on mobile platforms where feature extractions is executed using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients. The resulting features are transmitted to the server instead of raw voice data to reduce network load. Actual voice verification takes place in the central server using Vector Quantisation.FindingsThe initial results have indicated that VoxGrid is capable of providing an additional level of security on user authentications at a low cost and without using extra security tokens other than one's voice with a good enough performance given the limited resources available during testing.Originality/valuePast speaker verification experiments have been conducted but we see that this is the first time it is done on mobile devices with a client‐server architecture using K‐Means Clustering and Vector Quantisation. Future improvements on performance and testing could result in a more secure mobile computing environment.