Detecting Audio Deepfakes on the Edge: Lightweight SSL-Based Detection in a Browser Plugin

Audio deepfakes are a growing challenge for the general public, as well as for journalists and fact-checkers. The latter need reliable tools to verify the authenticity of their sources, while at the same time keeping their information private. Commercial deepfake detection solutions rely on cloud-based processing, which raises privacy concerns. To solve this problem, we propose an on-device audio deepfake detection model. We show that a truncated self-supervised backbone with a simple logistic classifier is both very fast and often more accurate than existing solutions. Our solution outperforms the baseline AASIST by $10 \%$ and improves inference speed by $40 \%$. We integrate this model into a browser plug-in, which allows journalists and fact-checkers to detect deepfakes easily and securely. Code for the plugin is available at https://github.com/OctavianPascu97/ Audio-Deepfakes-Browser-Plugin.