FAWA: Fast Adversarial Watermark Attack

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.

Adversarial attacks have exposed serious vulnerabilities in deep neural networks (DNNs), causing misclassifications through human-imperceptible perturbations to DNN inputs. We explore a new direction in the field of adversarial attacks by suggesting attacks that aim to degrade the energy or latency of DNNs rather than their classification accuracy. As a specific embodiment of this new threat vector, we propose and demonstrate adversarial sparsity attacks, which modify a DNN's inputs so as to reduce sparsity (or the incidence of zeros) in its internal activation values. Exploiting sparsity in hardware and software has emerged as a popular approach to improve DNN efficiency in resource-constrained systems. The proposed attack, therefore, increases the execution time and energy consumption of sparsity-optimized DNN implementations, raising concern over their deployment in latency and energy-critical applications. We propose a systematic methodology to generate adversarial inputs for sparsity attacks by formulating an objective function that quantifies the network's activation sparsity and minimizing this function using iterative gradient-descent techniques. To prevent easy detection of the attack, we further ensure that the perturbation magnitude is within a specified constraint and that the perturbation does not affect classification accuracy. We launch both white-box and black-box versions of adversarial sparsity attacks on image recognition DNNs and demonstrate that they decrease activation sparsity by 1.16×-1.82×. On a sparsity-optimized DNN accelerator, the attack results in degradations of 1.12×-1.59× in latency and 1.18×-1.99× in energy-delay product (EDP). Additionally, we analyze the impact of various hyperparameters and constraints on the attack's efficacy. Finally, we evaluate defense techniques, such as activation thresholding and input quantization and demonstrate that the proposed attack is able to withstand them, highlighting the need for further efforts in this new direction within the field of adversarial machine learning.

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(DNNs) are widely used in AI-controlled Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to controll cars, robotics, water treatment plants and railways. However, DNNs have vulnerabilities to well-designed input samples that are called adversarial examples. Adversary attack is one of the important techniques for detecting and improving the security of neural networks. Existing attacks, including state-of-the-art black-box attack have a lower success rate and make invalid queries that are not beneficial to obtain the direction of generating adversarial examples. For these reasons, this paper proposed a CMA-ES-based adversarial attack on black-box DNNs. Firstly, an efficient method to reduce the number of invalid queries is introduced. Secondly, a black-box attack of generating adversarial examples to fit a high-dimensional independent Gaussian distribution of the local solution space is proposed. Finally, a new CMA-based perturbation compression method is applied to make the process of reducing perturbation smoother. Experimental results on ImageNet classifiers show that the proposed attack has a higher success-rate than the state-of-the-art black-box attack but reduce the number of queries by 30% equally.

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have strong capabilities of memories, feature identifications and automatic analyses, solving various complex problems. However, DNN classifiers have obvious fragility that adding several unnoticeable perturbations to the original examples will lead to the errors in the classifier identification. In the field of communications, the adversarial examples will greatly reduce the accuracy of the signal identification, causing great information security risks. Considering the adversarial examples pose a serious threat to the security of the DNN models, studying their generation mechanisms and testing their attack effects are critical to ensuring the information security of the communication networks. This paper will study the generation of the adversarial examples and the influences of the adversarial examples on the accuracy of the DNN-based communication signal identification. Meanwhile, this paper will study the influences of the adversarial examples under the white-box models and black-box models, and explore the adversarial attack influences of the factors such as perturbation levels and iterative steps. The insights of this study would be helpful for ensuring the security of information networks and designing robust DNN communication networks.

Classification of Bisyllabic Lexical Stress Patterns Using Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks currently dominate many fields of the artificial intelligence landscape, achieving state-of-the-art results on numerous tasks while remaining hard to understand and exhibiting surprising weaknesses. An active area of research focuses on adversarial attacks, which aim to generate inputs that uncover these weaknesses. However, this proves challenging, especially in the black-box scenario where model details are inaccessible. This paper explores in detail the impact of such adversarial algorithms on ResNet-18, DenseNet-121, Swin Transformer V2, and Vision Transformer network architectures. Leveraging the Tiny ImageNet, Caltech-256, and Food-101 datasets, we benchmark two novel black-box iterative adversarial algorithms based on affine transformations and genetic algorithms: 1) Affine Transformation Attack (ATA), an iterative algorithm maximizing our attack score function using random affine transformations, and 2) Affine Genetic Attack (AGA), a genetic algorithm that involves random noise and affine transformations. We evaluate the performance of the models in the algorithm parameter variation, data augmentation, and global and targeted attack configurations. We also compare our algorithms with two black-box adversarial algorithms, Pixle and Square Attack. Our experiments yield better results on the image classification task than similar methods in the literature, achieving an accuracy improvement of up to 8.82%. We provide noteworthy insights into successful adversarial defenses and attacks at both global and targeted levels, and demonstrate adversarial robustness through algorithm parameter variation.

Deep convolutional neural networks have achieved great success in recent years. They have been widely used in various applications such as optical and SAR image scene classification, object detection and recognition, semantic segmentation, and change detection. However, deep neural networks rely on large-scale high-quality training data, and can only guarantee good performance when the training and test data are independently sampled from the same distribution. Deep convolutional neural networks are found to be vulnerable to subtle adversarial perturbations. This adversarial vulnerability prevents the deployment of deep neural networks in security-sensitive applications such as medical, surveillance, autonomous driving and military scenarios. This paper first presents a holistic view of security issues for deep convolutional neural network-based image recognition systems. The entire information processing chain is analyzed regarding safety and security risks. In particular, poisoning attacks and evasion attacks on deep convolutional neural networks are analyzed in detail. The root causes of adversarial vulnerabilities of deep recognition models are also discussed. Then, we give a formal definition of adversarial robustness and present a comprehensive review of adversarial attacks, adversarial defense, and adversarial robustness evaluation. Rather than listing existing research, we focus on the threat models for the adversarial attack and defense arms race. We perform a detailed analysis of several representative adversarial attacks on SAR image recognition models and provide an example of adversarial robustness evaluation. Finally, several open questions are discussed regarding recent research progress from our workgroup. This paper can be further used as a reference to develop more robust deep neural network-based image recognition models in dynamic adversarial scenarios.

In the past decade, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved breakthrough collaborations in developing smart intelligent systems within the field of computer vision, natural language processing, autonomous systems, etc. Recent research has revealed that stability of such smart systems is at greater risk when they come across to adversarial perturbations. Although, these perturbations may not be perceivable in nature when seen from naked eye, yet, they are capable enough to fool state-of-the-art DNN classifiers. Till now, much of the previous work related to fool such classifiers focuses on generating adversaries that directly change pixel values of an image in spatial-domain. In this paper, we propose a novel transform-domain imperceptible attack methodology “TDIAM” to generate adversaries based on image steganography-approach using a “single carefully selected targeted watermark”. We use three different frequency-domain approaches, i.e., Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to craft perturbations in selective frequency component which makes it robust and it requires less computational time as it is a non-gradient approach. We present our case study on MNIST handwritten digits dataset. Our results demonstrate that the generated perturbation vector successfully fool simple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), LeNet-5 and AlexNet architectures by increasing probability of adversarial examples for the targeted class (to which the targeted watermark belongs) in both “black-box” and “white-box” adversarial attacks. The results have shown that among these three perturbation approaches, DWT based perturbation shown promising results by effectively fooling DNNs while ensuring the high imperceptibility as well.

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 widespread applications of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), the safety of DNNs has become a significant issue. The vulnerability of the neural networks against adversarial examples deepens concerns about the safety of DNNs applications. This paper proposed a novel defence method to improve the adversarial robustness of DNN classifiers without using adversarial training. This method introduces two new loss functions. First, a zero-cross-entropy loss is used to punish overconfidence and find the appropriate confidence for different instances. Second, a logit balancing loss is proposed to protect DNNs from non-targeted attacks by regularising incorrect classes’ logits distribution. This method achieved competitive adversarial robustness compared to advanced adversarial training methods. Meanwhile, a novel robustness diagram is proposed to analyse, interpret and visualise the robustness of DNN classifiers against adversarial attacks. Furthermore, a Log-Softmax-pattern-based adversarial attack detection method is proposed. This detection method can distinguish clean inputs and multiple adversarial attacks via one multi-classification MLP. In particular, it is state-of-the-art in identifying white-box gradient-based attacks; it achieved at least 95.5% accuracy for classifying four white-box gradient-based attacks with maximum 0.1% false positive ratio.

CardioDefense: Defending against adversarial attack in ECG classification with adversarial distillation training

Resisting the adversarial sample attack on encrypted traffic is a challenging task in the Intelligent Transportation System. This paper focuses on the classification, adversarial samples attack and defense method for the encrypted traffic. To be more specific, the one-dimensional encrypted traffic data is firstly translated into the two-dimensional images for further utilization. Then different classification networks based on the deep learning algorithm are adopted to classify the encrypted traffic data. Moreover, various adversarial sample generation methods are employed to generate the adversarial sample to implement the attacking process on the classification network. Furthermore, the passive and active defense method are proposed to resist the adversarial sample attack: 1) the passive defense is used to denoise the perturbation in the adversarial sample and to restore to the original image; and 2) the active defense is used to resist the adversarial sample attack by leveraging the adversarial training method, which can improve the robustness of the classification network. We conduct the extensive experiments on the ISCXVPN2016 dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of classification, adversarial sample attacking and defending.

Masking and purifying inputs for blocking textual adversarial attacks

ContextMachine learning-based security detection models have become prevalent in modern malware and intrusion detection systems. However, previous studies show that such models are susceptible to adversarial evasion attacks. In this type of attack, inputs (i.e., adversarial examples) are specially crafted by intelligent malicious adversaries, with the aim of being misclassified by existing state-of-the-art models (e.g., deep neural networks). Once the attackers can fool a classifier to think that a malicious input is actually benign, they can render a machine learning-based malware or intrusion detection system ineffective.ObjectiveTo help security practitioners and researchers build a more robust model against non-adaptive, white-box and non-targeted adversarial evasion attacks through the idea of ensemble model.MethodWe propose an approach called Omni, the main idea of which is to explore methods that create an ensemble of “unexpected models”; i.e., models whose control hyperparameters have a large distance to the hyperparameters of an adversary’s target model, with which we then make an optimized weighted ensemble prediction.ResultsIn studies with five types of adversarial evasion attacks (FGSM, BIM, JSMA, DeepFool and Carlini-Wagner) on five security datasets (NSL-KDD, CIC-IDS-2017, CSE-CIC-IDS2018, CICAndMal2017 and the Contagio PDF dataset), we show Omni is a promising approach as a defense strategy against adversarial attacks when compared with other baseline treatments.ConclusionsWhen employing ensemble defense against adversarial evasion attacks, we suggest to create ensemble with unexpected models that are distant from the attacker’s expected model (i.e., target model) through methods such as hyperparameter optimization.