Chatbot Security and Privacy in the Age of Personal Assistants

The rise of personal assistants serves as a testament to the growing popularity of chatbots. However, as the field advances, it is important for the conversational AI community to keep in mind any potential vulnerabilities in existing architectures and how attackers could take advantantage of them. Towards this end, we present a survey of existing dialogue system vulnerabilities in security and privacy. We define chatbot security and give some background regarding the state of the art in the field. This analysis features a comprehensive description of potential attacks of each module in a typical chatbot architecture: the client module, communication module, response generation module, and database module.