{"ID":2861185,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03548","arxiv_id":"2510.03548","title":"Unmasking Puppeteers: Leveraging Biometric Leakage to Expose Impersonation in AI-Based Videoconferencing","abstract":"AI-based talking-head videoconferencing systems reduce bandwidth by sending a compact pose-expression latent and re-synthesizing RGB at the receiver, but this latent can be puppeteered, letting an attacker hijack a victim's likeness in real time. Because every frame is synthetic, deepfake and synthetic video detectors fail outright. To address this security problem, we exploit a key observation: the pose-expression latent inherently contains biometric information of the driving identity. Therefore, we introduce the first biometric leakage defense without ever looking at the reconstructed RGB video: a pose-conditioned, large-margin contrastive encoder that isolates persistent identity cues inside the transmitted latent while cancelling transient pose and expression. A simple cosine test on this disentangled embedding flags illicit identity swaps as the video is rendered. Our experiments on multiple talking-head generation models show that our method consistently outperforms existing puppeteering defenses, operates in real-time, and shows strong generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios.","short_abstract":"AI-based talking-head videoconferencing systems reduce bandwidth by sending a compact pose-expression latent and re-synthesizing RGB at the receiver, but this latent can be puppeteered, letting an attacker hijack a victim's likeness in real time. Because every frame is synthetic, deepfake and synthetic video detectors...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03548","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03548v4","authors":"[\"Danial Samadi Vahdati\",\"Tai Duc Nguyen\",\"Ekta Prashnani\",\"Koki Nagano\",\"David Luebke\",\"Orazio Gallo\",\"Matthew Stamm\"]","published":"2025-10-03T22:37:03Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}