SecHeadset: A Practical Privacy Protection System for Real-time Voice Communication

Voice communication is convenient while also poses risks of privacy leakage, due to potential interception or eavesdropping during voice transmission. Current protections of voice privacy are almost entirely controlled by communication service providers (CSPs), which operate as a black-box to users thus hard to fully trust. To take back the control of user privacy, in this paper, we introduce SecHeadset, an end-to-end solution for secure voice communication based on voice obfuscation, which is plug-and-play and compatible with various CSPs. Our solution involves two parts. First, we design a voice-like noise masking scheme for voice obfuscation. The noise, mimicking voice characteristics, could e!ectively obscure users’ voices while demonstrating resilience against noise reduction methods. Second, we develop a protocol that enables e”cient channel state estimation and secure information exchange between two communication entities. Based on this information, we propose a lightweight algorithm for voice retrieval during communication. We develop a prototype of SecHeadset and evaluate its performance with 8 widely-used applications, including Telegram and Skype. It reduces the voice recognition accuracy of various adversaries to below 15% while maintaining communication quality. We also integrate SecHeadset with o!-the-shelf portable devices and verify its real-world effectiveness.

Recommended citation: Huang, P., Pan, K., Wang, Q., Cheng, P., Lu, L., Ba, Z., Ren, K. (2025). "SecHeadset: A Practical Privacy Protection System for Real-time Voice Communication." *Proceedings of the ACM MobiSys 2025*.
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