SENTRY: A Streaming Edge Network Trust Engine for Real-Time Audio Deepfake Detection

Overview & Synopsis

Real-time voice cloning has enabled large-scale streaming deepfake and vishing attacks, while existing Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions rely on GPU-based post-processing that requires buffered audio and generalizes poorly to unseen speech synthesis models. This paper presents SENTRY, a hardware-oriented, streaming trust engine for inline deepfake detection at the network edge. SENTRY employs an integer lifting-wavelet front end together with a bank of multiplier-free transforms, including wavelet-packet envelopes, Walsh-Hadamard sequency profiles, waveform micro-statistics, and long-term spectral features, designed so that acoustic analysis needs only integer add, shift, compare and bitwise operations. A supervised gradient-boosted tree classifier is combined with an unsupervised Mahalanobis out-of-distribution detector trained solely on authentic speech, and their outputs are fused by a lightweight logistic layer to produce graduated LOG, CHALLENGE, or DROP actions. Under a closed-set protocol, SENTRY reaches 98.75% accuracy at a 1.25% equal-error rate (EER) on WaveFake, with perfect separation of HiFi-GAN and WaveGlow; its supervised track alone achieves an AUC of 0.9994 (fused: 0.9993). On ASVspoof 2019 LA (attacks A01-A06) over an 8 kHz mu-law telephony channel, it reaches 94.75% accuracy at a 5.05% EER, with a supervised-track AUC of 0.9948 (fused: 0.9884) and per-attack EERs below 7%. In our prototype, the feature front end runs as bit-exact integer code on one Arm Cortex-A53 core, and the classifier and fusion stage are synthesized for a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC using no DSP slices, returning a decision 220 ns after a feature vector is ready. These results indicate that deepfake screening can be placed inline without GPUs or floating-point hardware; generalization to unseen generators is left to future work.