ASSMark: Dual Defense Against Speech Synthesis Attack via Adversarial Robust Watermarking

Given the widespread dissemination of digital audio and the advancements in speech synthesis technologies, protecting audio copyright has become a critical issue. Although watermarks play an important role in copyright verification and forensic analysis, they are insufficient to proactively defend against malicious speech synthesis. To address this issue, we introduce a novel adversarial speech synthesis watermarking mechanism (ASSMark), which simultaneously traces the audio copyright and disrupts the speech synthesis models by embedding robust adversarial watermarks in a one-time manner. Specifically, we design a unified training framework that models the embedding of watermarks and adversarial perturbations as collaborative tasks. This approach allows for the fine-tuning of any robust watermark into an adversarial watermark, resulting in watermarked audio that can effectively defend against unauthorized speech synthesis attacks. Experimental results demonstrate that ASSMark achieves over 90% protection rate even to unknown black-box models. Compared to simplistic two-step protection methods, it not only effectively resists synthesis attacks but also achieves superior watermark extraction accuracy and speech quality, offering an outstanding solution for protecting audio copyright.