Aug 26, 2024

Phish Tycoon: phishing using voice cloning

Craig Albuquerque, Melwina Albuquerque

This project is a public service announcement highlighting the risks of voice cloning, an AI technology capable of creating synthetic voices nearly indistinguishable from real ones. The demo involves recording a user's voice during a phone call to generate a clone, which is then used in a simulated phishing call targeting the user's loved one.

Reviewer's Comments

Reviewer's Comments

Arrow
Arrow
Arrow

Nice idea! Showing the entire workflow of audio collection→voice clone→scam phone call is quite helpful. I do recommend using better TTS and voice cloning. As is, the clone doesn’t really sound like you and the robotic TTS decreases the impact of the demo.

I really liked it. I would suggest using a better TTS during the conversational part, as this would have allowed for better immersion and to project what it could look like to have a conversation with someone over the phone only to have your voice stolen.The voice cloning was quite impressive although a bit off. With some polish I feel like this demo could really shine.

Fantastic project! This is a near-term risk, presented in a visceral way! I love the conciseness of the website, and the reveal of the generated audio message. Next steps for this project would be polish - you could use a better voice for the AI conversation (e.g. an ElevenLabs voice), the voice cloning could maybe use additional tuning too, and with more time you could improve the website presentation overall. Great work on this!

Cite this work

@misc {

title={

Phish Tycoon: phishing using voice cloning

},

author={

Craig Albuquerque, Melwina Albuquerque

},

date={

8/26/24

},

organization={Apart Research},

note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},

howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}

}

Recent Projects

View All

Feb 2, 2026

Markov Chain Lock Watermarking: Provably Secure Authentication for LLM Outputs

We present Markov Chain Lock (MCL) watermarking, a cryptographically secure framework for authenticating LLM outputs. MCL constrains token generation to follow a secret Markov chain over SHA-256 vocabulary partitions. Using doubly stochastic transition matrices, we prove four theoretical guarantees: (1) exponentially decaying false positive rates via Hoeffding bounds, (2) graceful degradation under adversarial modification with closed-form expected scores, (3) information-theoretic security without key access, and (4) bounded quality loss via KL divergence. Experiments on 173 Wikipedia prompts using Llama-3.2-3B demonstrate that the optimal 7-state soft cycle configuration achieves 100\% detection, 0\% FPR, and perplexity 4.20. Robustness testing confirms detection above 96\% even with 30\% word replacement. The framework enables $O(n)$ model-free detection, addressing EU AI Act Article 50 requirements. Code available at \url{https://github.com/ChenghengLi/MCLW}

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Prototyping an Embedded Off-Switch for AI Compute

This project prototypes an embedded off-switch for AI accelerators. The security block requires periodic cryptographic authorization to operate: the chip generates a nonce, an external authority signs it, and the chip verifies the signature before granting time-limited permission. Without valid authorization, outputs are gated to zero. The design was implemented in HardCaml and validated in simulation.

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Fingerprinting All AI Cluster I/O Without Mutually Trusted Processors

We design and simulate a "border patrol" device for generating cryptographic evidence of data traffic entering and leaving an AI cluster, while eliminating the specific analog and steganographic side-channels that post-hoc verification can not close. The device eliminates the need for any mutually trusted logic, while still meeting the security needs of the prover and verifier.

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Markov Chain Lock Watermarking: Provably Secure Authentication for LLM Outputs

We present Markov Chain Lock (MCL) watermarking, a cryptographically secure framework for authenticating LLM outputs. MCL constrains token generation to follow a secret Markov chain over SHA-256 vocabulary partitions. Using doubly stochastic transition matrices, we prove four theoretical guarantees: (1) exponentially decaying false positive rates via Hoeffding bounds, (2) graceful degradation under adversarial modification with closed-form expected scores, (3) information-theoretic security without key access, and (4) bounded quality loss via KL divergence. Experiments on 173 Wikipedia prompts using Llama-3.2-3B demonstrate that the optimal 7-state soft cycle configuration achieves 100\% detection, 0\% FPR, and perplexity 4.20. Robustness testing confirms detection above 96\% even with 30\% word replacement. The framework enables $O(n)$ model-free detection, addressing EU AI Act Article 50 requirements. Code available at \url{https://github.com/ChenghengLi/MCLW}

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Prototyping an Embedded Off-Switch for AI Compute

This project prototypes an embedded off-switch for AI accelerators. The security block requires periodic cryptographic authorization to operate: the chip generates a nonce, an external authority signs it, and the chip verifies the signature before granting time-limited permission. Without valid authorization, outputs are gated to zero. The design was implemented in HardCaml and validated in simulation.

Read More

This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.
This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.