Adversarial Example Attack on Electric Power Network Security Situation Awareness

The adversarial attack is a cutting-edge technique used to study the vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, most existing studies focus on the additive perturbation-based attack, which cannot represent real-world corruption and limit their applications. In particular, haze is a common natural phenomenon that significantly corrupts an image, which inevitably poses a potential threat to deep models. In this work, for the first attempt, we study the effects of haze on DNNs from the perspective of adversarial attacks and propose two adversarial haze attack methods. We first propose the optimization-based adversarial haze attack (OAdvHaze) that optimizes the parameters of the atmospheric scattering model with the guidance of a DNN to synthesize a hazy image, which leads to a high attack success rate. To achieve a more efficient attack, we further propose a predictive adversarial haze attack (PAdvHaze) employing a DNN to predict the hazing parameters through a one-step way. To validate the effectiveness of both methods, we conducted extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets, i.e., ILSVRC 2012 and NIPS 2017. OAdvHaze and PAdvHaze achieve comparable attack success rates and transferability to state-of-the-art attacks. This work would contribute to the evaluation and enhancement of the robustness of DNNs against haze perturbation that may happen in the real world.

Some recent articles have revealed that synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR-ATR) models based on deep learning are vulnerable to the attacks of adversarial examples and cause security problems. The adversarial attack can make a deep convolutional neural network (CNN)-based SAR-ATR system output the intended wrong label predictions by adding small adversarial perturbations to the SAR images. The existing optimization-based adversarial attack methods generate adversarial examples by minimizing the mean-squared reconstruction error, causing smooth target edge and blurry weak scattering centers in SAR images. In this paper, we build a UNet-generative adversarial network (GAN) to refine the generation of the SAR-ATR models’ adversarial examples. The UNet learns the separable features of the targets and generates the adversarial examples of SAR images. The GAN makes the generated adversarial examples approximate to real SAR images (with sharp target edge and explicit weak scattering centers) and improves the generation efficiency. We carry out abundant experiments using the proposed adversarial attack algorithm to fool the SAR-ATR models based on several advanced CNNs, which are trained on the measured SAR images of the ground vehicle targets. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the high-quality adversarial example generation and excellent attack effectiveness and efficiency improvement.

Most deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, making it crucial to develop effective defenses against them. Adversarial examples are created by applying slight perturbations either to the entire image or specific regions, depending on attack methods. By contrast, benign examples typically lead models to focus attention on contiguous regions of the image during classification. Therefore, adversarial examples can be detected effectively by leveraging attention values. First, we conduct simple experiment to investigate how the model’s attention responds to adversarial perturbations. Second, we derive features by calculating the changes in attention values across ViT layers for adversarial and benign examples. These attention-derived features are then fed into the detection model, ResNet-50, to learn the differences in the activation locations between both examples. Third, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by thorough experiments on various attack methods, datasets, and target models. The experiments prove the effectiveness of our approach, achieving superior performance compared to baseline methods on the ImageNet dataset across ViT-B and ViT-L. Our findings underscore the potential of utilizing attention-derived features as powerful indicators for enhancing the resilience of ViT models against adversarial perturbations.

Air transportation communication jamming recognition model based on deep learning (DL) can quickly and accurately identify and classify communication jamming, to improve the safety and reliability of air traffic. However, due to the vulnerability of deep learning, the jamming recognition model can be easily attacked by the attacker’s carefully designed adversarial examples. Although some defense methods have been proposed, they have strong pertinence to attacks. Thus, new attack methods are needed to improve the defense performance of the model. In this work, we improve the existing attack methods and propose a double level attack method. By constructing the dynamic iterative step size and analyzing the class characteristics of the signals, this method can use the adversarial losses of feature layer and decision layer to generate adversarial examples with stronger attack performance. In order to improve the robustness of the recognition model, we use adversarial examples to train the model, and transfer the knowledge learned from the model to the jamming recognition models in other wireless communication environments by transfer learning. Simulation results show that the proposed attack and defense methods have good performance.

Adversarial examples: A survey of attacks and defenses in deep learning-enabled cybersecurity systems

The goal of textual adversarial attack methods is to replace some words in an input text in order to make the victim model misbehave. This article proposes an effective word-level adversarial attack method based on sememes and an improved quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) algorithm. The sememe-based substitute method, which uses the words sharing the same sememes as the substitutes of the original words, is first employed to form the reduced search space. Then, an improved QPSO algorithm, called historical information-guided QPSO with random drift local attractor (HIQPSO-RD), is proposed to search the reduced search space for adversarial examples. The HIQPSO-RD introduces historical information into the current mean best position of the QPSO, for the purpose of improving the convergence speed of the algorithm, by enhancing its exploration ability and preventing the premature convergence of the swarm. The proposed algorithm uses the random drift local attractor technique to make a good balance between its exploration and exploitation, so that the algorithm can find a better adversarial attack example with low grammaticality and perplexity (PPL). In addition, it employs a two-stage diversity control strategy to enhance the search performance of the algorithm. Experiments on three natural language processing (NLP) datasets, with three commonly used nature language processing models as victim models, show that our method achieves higher attack success rates but lower modification rates than the state-of-the-art adversarial attack methods. Moreover, the results of human evaluations show that adversarial examples generated by our method can better maintain the semantic similarity and grammatical correctness of the original input.

In recent years, with the widespread application of Vision Transformer (ViT) in visual trackers, their robustness has received increasing attention. However, by focusing on global interactions between image patches, ViT reduces sensitivity to local noise, posing new challenges for adversarial attacks. Meanwhile, existing decision-based adversarial attack methods often overlook the differences in noise sensitivity between different patches, further limiting the compression efficiency of adversarial noise, especially in ViT. In visual tracking, existing adversarial attack methods primarily target Siamese network-based trackers, and research on adversarial attacks against Transformer-based trackers, particularly decision-based black-box attacks, is still relatively limited. To implement effective black-box attacks on Transformer-based trackers, this paper innovatively proposes patch-based adversarial noise compression (PANC), a decision-based adversarial attack method. This method effectively compresses adversarial noise patch by patch, significantly improving compression efficiency and attack concealment. PANC also introduces a noise sensitivity matrix that dynamically adds and reduces adversarial noise, optimizing the spatial distribution of noise while decreasing the number of queries. We validated the effectiveness of the proposed PANC attack method on several Transformer-based trackers, including OSTrack, STARK, TransT, and MixformerV2, and three public large-scale benchmark datasets: GOT-10k, TrackingNet, and LaSOT. Experimental results show that compared to the existing state-of-the-art adversarial attack method, the IoU attack, PANC compresses the noise level to 10%, improving the attack effectiveness by 162% with the number of queries of only 45.7%. Furthermore, PANC can serve as an initialization or post-processing optimization strategy for other adversarial attack methods, providing a more flexible and efficient mechanism for adversarial example generation. Our work reveals the vulnerabilities of existing Transformer-based visual trackers and offers new ideas for further improving the efficiency and concealment of adversarial attacks.

Deep neural networks have made tremendous progress in 3D object detection, which is an important task especially in autonomous driving scenarios. Benefited from the breakthroughs in deep learning and sensor technologies, 3D object detection methods based on different sensors, such as camera and LiDAR, have developed rapidly. Meanwhile, more and more researches notice that the abundant information contained in the multi-view data can be used to obtain more accurate understanding of the 3D surrounding environment. Therefore, many sensor-fusion 3D object detection methods have been proposed. As safety is critical in autonomous driving and the deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples with visually imperceptible perturbations, it is significant to investigate adversarial attacks for 3D object detection. Recent works have shown that both image-based and LiDAR-based networks can be attacked by the adversarial examples while the attacks to the sensor-fusion models, which tend to be more robust, haven't been studied. To this end, we propose a simple multi-view correlation based adversarial attack method for the camera-LiDAR fusion 3D object detection models and focus on the black-box attack setting which is more practical in real-world systems. Specifically, we first design a generative network to generate image adversarial examples based on an auxiliary image semantic segmentation network. Then, we develop a cross-view perturbation projection method by exploiting the camera-LiDAR correlations to map each image adversarial example to the space of the point cloud data to form the point cloud adversarial examples in the LiDAR view. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

With the continuous development of deep learning in the field of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image processing, it is found that image recognition is vulnerable to interference and the accuracy is greatly reduced. Therefore, if a general adversarial attack method is designed to generate adversarial examples(AEs) capable of deceiving different types of convolutional neural network models, it can protect target images from being correctly recognized by adversaries and safeguard image privacy information. However, most of the current adversarial attack methods have too large attack scope and interference intensity, and do not have the ability to universally attack different neural network models, resulting in poor concealment, deception, and transfer deception of adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a general Key Points Sparse Attack (KPSA) method for SAR images, which achieves excellent deception and transfer deception while controlling the attack range and jamming strength. It is a general and efficient adversarial attack method. KPSA uses the generator to generate intensity interference images and imposes amplitude constraint, uses the key points extraction method to generate position interference images to realize sparse attack, uses the difference value(d-value) loss function to achieve fast convergence of the training model, and achieves transfer deception performance without depending on the type of discriminator. The deception rate and transfer deception rate experiments were conducted on MSTAR and ATRNet-STAR. By comparing with the advanced methods in the field of adversarial attacks, it was verified that the KPSA method is superior to the current advanced methods, and it was confirmed that the KPSA method has application value in various complex practical scenarios.

With the continuous development of wireless communication and artificial intelligence technology, Internet of Things (IoT) technology has made great progress. Deep learning methods are currently used in IoT technology, but deep neural networks (DNNs) are notoriously susceptible to adversarial examples, and subtle pixel changes to images can result in incorrect recognition results from DNNs. In the real‐world application, the patches generated by the recent physical attack methods are larger or less realistic and easily detectable. To address this problem, a Generative Adversarial Network based on Visual attention model and Style transfer network (GAN‐VS) is proposed, which reduces the patch area and makes the patch more natural and less noticeable. A visual attention model combined with generative adversarial network is introduced to detect the critical regions of image recognition, and only generate patches within the critical regions to reduce patch area and improve attack efficiency. For any type of seed patch, an adversarial patch can be generated with a high degree of stylistic and content similarity to the attacked image by generative adversarial network and style transfer network. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed GAN‐VS has good camouflage and outperforms state‐of‐the‐art adversarial patch attack methods.

State-of-the-art neural network models are actively used in various fields, but it is well-known that they are vulnerable to adversarial example attacks. Throughout the efforts to make the models robust against adversarial example attacks, it has been found to be a very difficult task. While many defense approaches were shown to be not effective, adversarial training remains as one of the promising methods. In adversarial training, the training data are augmented by “adversarial” samples generated using an attack algorithm. If the attacker uses a similar attack algorithm to generate adversarial examples, the adversarially trained network can be quite robust to the attack. However, there are numerous ways of creating adversarial examples, and the defender does not know what algorithm the attacker may use. A natural question is: Can we use adversarial training to train a model robust to multiple types of attack? Previous work have shown that, when a network is trained with adversarial examples generated from multiple attack methods, the network is still vulnerable to white-box attacks where the attacker has complete access to the model parameters. In this paper, we study this question in the context of black-box attacks, which can be a more realistic assumption for practical applications. Experiments with the MNIST dataset show that adversarially training a network with an attack method helps defending against that particular attack method, but has limited effect for other attack methods. In addition, even if the defender trains a network with multiple types of adversarial examples and the attacker attacks with one of the methods, the network could lose accuracy to the attack if the attacker uses a different data augmentation strategy on the target network. These results show that it is very difficult to make a robust network using adversarial training, even for black-box settings where the attacker has restricted information on the target network.

Feature-filter: Detecting adversarial examples by filtering out recessive features

Deep neural networks, which can learn the representative and discriminative features from data in a hierarchical manner, have achieved state-of-the-art performance in the remote sensing scene classification task. Despite the great success that deep learning algorithms have obtained, their vulnerability toward adversarial examples deserves our special attention. In this article, we systematically analyze the threat of adversarial examples on deep neural networks for remote sensing scene classification. Both targeted and untargeted attacks are performed to generate subtle adversarial perturbations, which are imperceptible to a human observer but may easily fool the deep learning models. Simply adding these perturbations to the original high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images, adversarial examples can be generated, and there are only slight differences between the adversarial examples and the original ones. An intriguing discovery in our study shows that most of these adversarial examples may be misclassified into the wrong category by the state-of-the-art deep neural networks with very high confidence. This phenomenon, undoubtedly, may limit the practical deployment of these deep learning models in the safety-critical remote sensing field. To address this problem, the adversarial training strategy is further investigated in this article, which significantly increases the resistibility of deep models toward adversarial examples. Extensive experiments on three benchmark HRRS image data sets demonstrate that while most of the well-known deep neural networks are sensitive to adversarial perturbations, the adversarial training strategy helps to alleviate their vulnerability toward adversarial examples.

Deep learning has revolutionized image recognition. One significant obstacle still remains, the vulnerability of these models to adversarial attacks. These attacks manipulate images with subtle changes that cause CNN misclassification. While methods, such as adversarial training, have been proposed to defend against adversarial attacks, they incur additional training costs, either extra input samples or auxiliary models. In this work, we propose an efficient approach to deploying robust models that utilize image transformations to remove adversarial noises. We investigate the performance of simple transformations and report several effective ones, including Affine blur, Gaussian blur, Median blur, and Bilateral blur against various adversarial attack methods, such as Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), Randomized + FGSM (RFGSM), and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). We apply these image transformation techniques to the widely used ImageNet dataset, and experimental results demonstrate the potential of image transformation methods as a strong defense against adversarial attacks in deep learning-based image classification systems, especially when combined with cutting-edge neural network architectures such as ResNet50 and DenseNet121. Our comprehensive results show that these transformations can significantly improve the robustness of CNN models against adversarial attacks on ImageNet, achieving a recovery rate of up to 85% to 90% without incurring extra resource costs.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in various recognition tasks. However, recently DNNs have been shown to be vulnerable against adversarial examples, which can mislead DNNs to make arbitrary incorrect predictions. While adversarial examples are well studied in classification tasks, other learning problems may have different properties. For instance, semantic segmentation requires additional components such as dilated convolutions and multiscale processing. In this paper, we aim to characterize adversarial examples based on spatial context information in semantic segmentation. We observe that spatial consistency information can be potentially leveraged to detect adversarial examples robustly even when a strong adaptive attacker has access to the model and detection strategies. We also show that adversarial examples based on attacks considered within the paper barely transfer among models, even though transferability is common in classification. Our observations shed new light on developing adversarial attacks and defenses to better understand the vulnerabilities of DNNs.