Introduction to the issue on spoofing and countermeasures for automatic speaker verification

The papers in this special issue focus on automatic speaker verification (ASV) technologies and applications for their use. ASV offers a low-cost and flexible solution to biometric authentication. While there liability ofASV systems is now considered sufficient to support mass-market adoption, there are concerns that the technology is vulnerable to spoofing, also referred to as presentation attacks. Spoofing refers to an attack whereby a fraudster attempts to manipulate a biometric system by masquerading as another, enrolled person. Replayed, synthesized and converted speech spoofing attacks can all be used to present high-quality, convincing speech signals which are representative of other, specific speakers and thus present a genuine threat to the reliability of ASV authentication systems.