VoxGuard: Evaluating User and Attribute Privacy in Speech via Membership Inference Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tsaprazlis, Efthymios, Lertpetchpun, Thanathai, Feng, Tiantian, Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth, Narayanan, Shrikanth
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tsaprazlis, Efthymios
Lertpetchpun, Thanathai
Feng, Tiantian
Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth
Narayanan, Shrikanth
author_facet Tsaprazlis, Efthymios
Lertpetchpun, Thanathai
Feng, Tiantian
Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth
Narayanan, Shrikanth
contents Voice anonymization aims to conceal speaker identity and attributes while preserving intelligibility, but current evaluations rely almost exclusively on Equal Error Rate (EER) that obscures whether adversaries can mount high-precision attacks. We argue that privacy should instead be evaluated in the low false-positive rate (FPR) regime, where even a small number of successful identifications constitutes a meaningful breach. To this end, we introduce VoxGuard, a framework grounded in differential privacy and membership inference that formalizes two complementary notions: User Privacy, preventing speaker re-identification, and Attribute Privacy, protecting sensitive traits such as gender and accent. Across synthetic and real datasets, we find that informed adversaries, especially those using fine-tuned models and max-similarity scoring, achieve orders-of-magnitude stronger attacks at low-FPR despite similar EER. For attributes, we show that simple transparent attacks recover gender and accent with near-perfect accuracy even after anonymization. Our results demonstrate that EER substantially underestimates leakage, highlighting the need for low-FPR evaluation, and recommend VoxGuard as a benchmark for evaluating privacy leakage.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_18413
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VoxGuard: Evaluating User and Attribute Privacy in Speech via Membership Inference Attacks
Tsaprazlis, Efthymios
Lertpetchpun, Thanathai
Feng, Tiantian
Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth
Narayanan, Shrikanth
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Voice anonymization aims to conceal speaker identity and attributes while preserving intelligibility, but current evaluations rely almost exclusively on Equal Error Rate (EER) that obscures whether adversaries can mount high-precision attacks. We argue that privacy should instead be evaluated in the low false-positive rate (FPR) regime, where even a small number of successful identifications constitutes a meaningful breach. To this end, we introduce VoxGuard, a framework grounded in differential privacy and membership inference that formalizes two complementary notions: User Privacy, preventing speaker re-identification, and Attribute Privacy, protecting sensitive traits such as gender and accent. Across synthetic and real datasets, we find that informed adversaries, especially those using fine-tuned models and max-similarity scoring, achieve orders-of-magnitude stronger attacks at low-FPR despite similar EER. For attributes, we show that simple transparent attacks recover gender and accent with near-perfect accuracy even after anonymization. Our results demonstrate that EER substantially underestimates leakage, highlighting the need for low-FPR evaluation, and recommend VoxGuard as a benchmark for evaluating privacy leakage.
title VoxGuard: Evaluating User and Attribute Privacy in Speech via Membership Inference Attacks
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18413