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The Centrelink Master Program (Centrelink) is a services master program of the Australian government. It is designed to deliver various payments and services for different types of citizens. Recently, a news reporter bypassed its voice authentication security measure easily.
Nick Evershed, a journalist for The Guardian, experimented to determine if the voice authentication of the Centrelink system could be tricked. Evershed used a free online AI service, inputting just around four minutes of audio of his voice. The journalist discovered that his cloned voice could access his account, along with his customer reference number.
Services Australia was notified of this, but according to The Guardian journalist Josh Taylor, Services Australia “has not indicated it will change its use of voice ID, saying the technology is a highly secure authentication method and the agency continually scans for potential threats and makes ongoing enhancements to ensure customer security”.
However, David Shoebridge, a Greens senator, noted that the finding was ‘deeply troubling.’ Shoebridge added that the government should allocate some money from the Redspice cyber defence program to improve cybersecurity for government services.
Shoebridge stated that “The concerns here go beyond the use of AI to trick voiceprint. There are few, if any, protections on the collection or use of our biometric data to feed and train corporate AI systems. We can’t rely on a whack-a-mole approach to digital security where issues are only dealt with once they embarrass the federal government.”
According to security experts, the voiceprint service is currently used by over 3.8 million customers of Centrelink and over 7.1 million customers of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). But the government agency assures the public that it is still safe. In an official statement, Service Australia noted that “Every time you use your voiceprint, our system checks your voice against the voiceprint you created. It uses secure technologies to hear parts of your voice that the human ear doesn’t. Every time you use your voiceprint, our system checks your voice against the voiceprint you created. It uses secure technologies to hear parts of your voice that the human ear doesn’t.”
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