Characterizing the Impact of Audio Deepfakes in the Presence of Cochlear Implant
Magdalena Pasternak
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 · Day 1 · Audio Security
In an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the proliferation of deepfakes poses a significant and evolving threat across various domains, from political disinformation to sophisticated financial scams. Magdalena Pasternak's talk at the NDSS Symposium, titled "Characterizing the Impact of Audio Deepfakes in the Presence of Cochlear Implant," delves into a critical, yet often overlooked, aspect of this challenge: the vulnerability of individuals with different auditory perceptions, specifically cochlear implant (CI) users, to audio deepfakes. Pasternak, a deepfake researcher herself, opens with a compelling personal anecdote of being momentarily fooled by an AI-generated voice, underscoring the insidious nature of these technologies even for experts.
AI review
Genuinely novel research that opens a population-specific vulnerability no one in the deepfake detection space has systematically examined before. The combination of human user study, acoustic simulation, and saliency-map analysis across two deepfake modalities is methodologically sound and produces concrete, actionable findings — not just 'CI users struggle,' but specifically why VC attacks collapse detection below chance for this group.