SkillBot: Identifying Risky Content for Children in Alexa Skills
SkillBot: Identifying Risky Content for Children in Alexa Skills
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DOI：
10.1145/3539609
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发表时间：
2021-02
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Tu Le;D. Huang;Noah J. Apthorpe;Yuan Tian
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作者：
Tu Le;D. Huang;Noah J. Apthorpe;Yuan Tian
许多家庭包括使用语音个人助理(VPA)(如Amazon Alexa)的儿童。儿童受益于VPA和第三方应用程序的丰富功能，但也面临VPA生态系统中的新风险。在这篇文章中，我们首先调查包含不恰当内容或通过语音交互请求个人信息的针对儿童的语音应用程序。我们构建了Skill Bot，这是一个基于自然语言处理的系统，可以自动与VPA应用程序交互并分析产生的对话。我们发现了28个有风险的面向儿童的应用程序，并维护着从3434个Alexa应用程序中收集的31,966个非重叠应用程序行为的不断增长的数据集。我们的发现表明，尽管面向儿童的VPA应用程序受到更严格的政策要求和更严格的审查，但儿童仍然容易受到不适当内容和隐私侵犯的影响。然后，我们进行了一项用户研究，显示家长们对识别出的高风险应用程序感到担忧。许多家长不相信这些应用程序是为家庭/儿童设计的，尽管这些应用程序实际上是在亚马逊的“儿童”产品类别中发布的。我们还发现，父母经常忽视基本的预防措施，比如在Alexa设备上启用父母控制。最后，我们确定了VPA生态系统中的一个新风险：多个应用程序共享的混淆语音或语音命令，可能会导致用户与不同的应用程序交互。我们发现了4487个令人困惑的话语，其中包括581个由儿童导向和非儿童导向的应用分享的。我们发现，在这些令人困惑的言论中，27%的人优先调用非儿童导向的应用程序，而不是儿童导向的应用程序。这表明，由于说话含混不清，儿童确实面临着意外调用非儿童定向应用程序的风险。
Many households include children who use voice personal assistants (VPA) such as Amazon Alexa. Children benefit from the rich functionalities of VPAs and third-party apps but are also exposed to new risks in the VPA ecosystem. In this article, we first investigate “risky” child-directed voice apps that contain inappropriate content or ask for personal information through voice interactions. We build SkillBot—a natural language processing-based system to automatically interact with VPA apps and analyze the resulting conversations. We find 28 risky child-directed apps and maintain a growing dataset of 31,966 non-overlapping app behaviors collected from 3,434 Alexa apps. Our findings suggest that although child-directed VPA apps are subject to stricter policy requirements and more intensive vetting, children remain vulnerable to inappropriate content and privacy violations. We then conduct a user study showing that parents are concerned about the identified risky apps. Many parents do not believe that these apps are available and designed for families/kids, although these apps are actually published in Amazon’s “Kids” product category. We also find that parents often neglect basic precautions, such as enabling parental controls on Alexa devices. Finally, we identify a novel risk in the VPA ecosystem: confounding utterances or voice commands shared by multiple apps that may cause a user to interact with a different app than intended. We identify 4,487 confounding utterances, including 581 shared by child-directed and non-child-directed apps. We find that 27% of these confounding utterances prioritize invoking a non-child-directed app over a child-directed app. This indicates that children are at real risk of accidentally invoking non-child-directed apps due to confounding utterances.