Biblio

We propose new, more efficient targeted whitebox attacks against deep neural networks. Our attacks better align with the attacker’s goal: (1) tricking a model to assign higher probability to the target class than to any other class, while (2) staying within an -distance of the attacked input. First, we demonstrate a loss function that explicitly encodes (1) and show that Auto-PGD finds more attacks with it. Second, we propose a new attack method, Constrained Gradient Descent (CGD), using a refinement of our loss function that captures both (1) and (2). CGD seeks to satisfy both attacker objectives—misclassification and bounded `p-norm—in a principled manner, as part of the optimization, instead of via ad hoc postprocessing techniques (e.g., projection or clipping). We show that CGD is more successful on CIFAR10 (0.9–4.2%) and ImageNet (8.6–13.6%) than state-of-the-art attacks while consuming less time (11.4–18.8%). Statistical tests confirm that our attack outperforms others against leading defenses on different datasets and values of .

Much research effort has been devoted to better understanding adversarial examples, which are specially crafted inputs to machine-learning models that are perceptually similar to benign inputs, but are classified differently (i.e., misclassified). Both algorithms that create adversarial examples and strategies for defending against them typically use Lp-norms to measure the perceptual similarity between an adversarial input and its benign original. Prior work has already shown, however, that two images need not be close to each other as measured by an Lp-norm to be perceptually similar. In this work, we show that nearness according to an Lp-norm is not just unnecessary for perceptual similarity, but is also insufficient. Specifically, focusing on datasets (CIFAR10 and MNIST), Lp-norms, and thresholds used in prior work, we show through online user studies that "adversarial examples" that are closer to their benign counterparts than required by commonly used Lp-norm thresholds can nevertheless be perceptually different to humans from the corresponding benign examples. Namely, the perceptual distance between two images that are "near" each other according to an Lp-norm can be high enough that participants frequently classify the two images as representing different objects or digits. Combined with prior work, we thus demonstrate that nearness of inputs as measured by Lp-norms is neither necessary nor sufficient for perceptual similarity, which has implications for both creating and defending against adversarial examples. We propose and discuss alternative similarity metrics to stimulate future research in the area.

Motivated by the transformative impact of deep neural networks (DNNs) in various domains, researchers and anti-virus vendors have proposed DNNs for malware detection from raw bytes that do not require manual feature engineering. In this work, we propose an attack that interweaves binary-diversification techniques and optimization frameworks to mislead such DNNs while preserving the functionality of binaries. Unlike prior attacks, ours manipulates instructions that are a functional part of the binary, which makes it particularly challenging to defend against. We evaluated our attack against three DNNs in white- and black-box settings, and found that it often achieved success rates near 100%. Moreover, we found that our attack can fool some commercial anti-viruses, in certain cases with a success rate of 85%. We explored several defenses, both new and old, and identified some that can foil over 80% of our evasion attempts. However, these defenses may still be susceptible to evasion by attacks, and so we advocate for augmenting malware-detection systems with methods that do not rely on machine learning.

Minimal adversarial perturbations added to inputs have been shown to be effective at fooling deep neural networks. In this paper, we introduce several innovations that make white-box targeted attacks follow the intuition of the attacker's goal: to trick the model to assign a higher probability to the target class than to any other, while staying within a specified distance from the original input. First, we propose a new loss function that explicitly captures the goal of targeted attacks, in particular, by using the logits of all classes instead of just a subset, as is common. We show that Auto-PGD with this loss function finds more adversarial examples than it does with other commonly used loss functions. Second, we propose a new attack method that uses a further developed version of our loss function capturing both the misclassification objective and the L∞ distance limit ϵ. This new attack method is relatively 1.5--4.2% more successful on the CIFAR10 dataset and relatively 8.2--14.9% more successful on the ImageNet dataset, than the next best state-of-the-art attack. We confirm using statistical tests that our attack outperforms state-of-the-art attacks on different datasets and values of ϵ and against different defenses.

Motivated by the transformative impact of deep neural networks (DNNs) on different areas (e.g., image and speech recognition), researchers and anti-virus vendors are proposing end-to-end DNNs for malware detection from raw bytes that do not require manual feature engineering. Given the security sensitivity of the task that these DNNs aim to solve, it is important to assess their susceptibility to evasion.
In this work, we propose an attack that guides binary-diversification tools via optimization to mislead DNNs for malware detection while preserving the functionality of binaries. Unlike previous attacks on such DNNs, ours manipulates instructions that are a functional part of the binary, which makes it particularly challenging to defend against. We evaluated our attack against three DNNs in white-box and black-box settings, and found that it can often achieve success rates near 100%. Moreover, we found that our attack can fool some commercial anti-viruses, in certain cases with a success rate of 85%. We explored several defenses, both new and old, and identified some that can successfully prevent over 80% of our evasion attempts. However, these defenses may still be susceptible to evasion by adaptive attackers, and so we advocate for augmenting malware-detection systems with methods that do not rely on machine learning.

This paper proposes a new defense called $n$-ML against adversarial examples, i.e., inputs crafted by perturbing benign inputs by small amounts to induce misclassifications by classifiers. Inspired by $n$-version programming, $n$-ML trains an ensemble of $n$ classifiers, and inputs are classified by a vote of the classifiers in the ensemble. Unlike prior such approaches, however, the classifiers in the ensemble are trained specifically to classify adversarial examples differently, rendering it very difficult for an adversarial example to obtain enough votes to be misclassified. We show that $n$-ML roughly retains the benign classification accuracies of state-of-the-art models on the MNIST, CIFAR10, and GTSRB datasets, while simultaneously defending against adversarial examples with better resilience than the best defenses known to date and, in most cases, with lower classification-time overhead.

Much research has been devoted to better understanding adversarial examples, which are specially crafted inputs to machine-learning models that are perceptually similar to benign inputs, but are classified differently (i.e., misclassified). Both algorithms that create adversarial examples and strategies for defending against adversarial examples typically use Lp-norms to measure the perceptual similarity between an adversarial input and its benign original. Prior work has already shown, however, that two images need not be close to each other as measured by an Lp-norm to be perceptually similar. In this work, we show that nearness according to an Lp-norm is not just unnecessary for perceptual similarity, but is also insufficient. Specifically, focusing on datasets (CIFAR10 and MNIST), Lp-norms, and thresholds used in prior work, we show through online user studies that “adversarial examples” that are closer to their benign counterparts than required by commonly used Lpnorm thresholds can nevertheless be perceptually distinct to humans from the corresponding benign examples. Namely, the perceptual distance between two images that are “near” each other according to an Lp-norm can be high enough that participants frequently classify the two images as representing different objects or digits. Combined with prior work, we thus demonstrate that nearness of inputs as measured by Lp-norms is neither necessary nor sufficient for perceptual similarity, which has implications for both creating and defending against adversarial examples. We propose and discuss alternative similarity metrics to stimulate future research in the area.