In data poisoning attacks, an adversary tries to change a model's prediction by adding, modifying, or removing samples in the training data. Recently, ensemble-based approaches for obtaining provable defenses against data poisoning have been proposed where predictions are done by taking a majority vote across multiple base models. In this work, we show that merely considering the majority vote in ensemble defenses is wasteful as it does not effectively utilize available information in the logits layers of the base models. Instead, we propose Run-Off Election (ROE), a novel aggregation method based on a two-round election across the base models: In the first round, models vote for their preferred class and then a second, Run-Off election is held between the top two classes in the first round. Based on this approach, we propose DPA+ROE and FA+ROE defense methods based on Deep Partition Aggregation (DPA) and Finite Aggregation (FA) approaches from prior work. We evaluate our methods on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and GTSRB and obtain improvements in certified accuracy by up to 3%-4%. Also, by applying ROE on a boosted version of DPA, we gain improvements around 12%-27% comparing to the current state-of-the-art, establishing a new state-of-the-art in (pointwise) certified robustness against data poisoning. In many cases, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art, even when using 32 times less computational power.
Randomness supports many critical functions in the field of machine learning (ML) including optimisation, data selection, privacy, and security. ML systems outsource the task of generating or harvesting randomness to the compiler, the cloud service provider or elsewhere in the toolchain. Yet there is a long history of attackers exploiting poor randomness, or even creating it -- as when the NSA put backdoors in random number generators to break cryptography. In this paper we consider whether attackers can compromise an ML system using only the randomness on which they commonly rely. We focus our effort on Randomised Smoothing, a popular approach to train certifiably robust models, and to certify specific input datapoints of an arbitrary model. We choose Randomised Smoothing since it is used for both security and safety -- to counteract adversarial examples and quantify uncertainty respectively. Under the hood, it relies on sampling Gaussian noise to explore the volume around a data point to certify that a model is not vulnerable to adversarial examples. We demonstrate an entirely novel attack against it, where an attacker backdoors the supplied randomness to falsely certify either an overestimate or an underestimate of robustness. We demonstrate that such attacks are possible, that they require very small changes to randomness to succeed, and that they can be hard to detect. As an example, we hide an attack in the random number generator and show that the randomness tests suggested by NIST fail to detect it. We advocate updating the NIST guidelines on random number testing to make them more appropriate for safety-critical and security-critical machine-learning applications.
Natural language processing (NLP) models have become increasingly popular in real-world applications, such as text classification. However, they are vulnerable to privacy attacks, including data reconstruction attacks that aim to extract the data used to train the model. Most previous studies on data reconstruction attacks have focused on LLM, while classification models were assumed to be more secure. In this work, we propose a new targeted data reconstruction attack called the Mix And Match attack, which takes advantage of the fact that most classification models are based on LLM. The Mix And Match attack uses the base model of the target model to generate candidate tokens and then prunes them using the classification head. We extensively demonstrate the effectiveness of the attack using both random and organic canaries. This work highlights the importance of considering the privacy risks associated with data reconstruction attacks in classification models and offers insights into possible leakages.
This paper is concerned with the optimal allocation of detection resources (sensors) to mitigate multi-stage attacks, in the presence of the defender's uncertainty in the attacker's intention. We model the attack planning problem using a Markov decision process and characterize the uncertainty in the attacker's intention using a finite set of reward functions -- each reward represents a type of the attacker. Based on this modeling framework, we employ the paradigm of the worst-case absolute regret minimization from robust game theory and develop mixed-integer linear program (MILP) formulations for solving the worst-case regret minimizing sensor allocation strategies for two classes of attack-defend interactions: one where the defender and attacker engage in a zero-sum game, and another where they engage in a non-zero-sum game. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework using a stochastic gridworld example.
Recent years have witnessed the great success of deep learning algorithms in the geoscience and remote sensing realm. Nevertheless, the security and robustness of deep learning models deserve special attention when addressing safety-critical remote sensing tasks. In this paper, we provide a systematic analysis of backdoor attacks for remote sensing data, where both scene classification and semantic segmentation tasks are considered. While most of the existing backdoor attack algorithms rely on visible triggers like squared patches with well-designed patterns, we propose a novel wavelet transform-based attack (WABA) method, which can achieve invisible attacks by injecting the trigger image into the poisoned image in the low-frequency domain. In this way, the high-frequency information in the trigger image can be filtered out in the attack, resulting in stealthy data poisoning. Despite its simplicity, the proposed method can significantly cheat the current state-of-the-art deep learning models with a high attack success rate. We further analyze how different trigger images and the hyper-parameters in the wavelet transform would influence the performance of the proposed method. Extensive experiments on four benchmark remote sensing datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for both scene classification and semantic segmentation tasks and thus highlight the importance of designing advanced backdoor defense algorithms to address this threat in remote sensing scenarios. The code will be available online at \url{//github.com/ndraeger/waba}.
Certifiably robust defenses against adversarial patches for image classifiers ensure correct prediction against any changes to a constrained neighborhood of pixels. PatchCleanser arXiv:2108.09135 [cs.CV], the state-of-the-art certified defense, uses a double-masking strategy for robust classification. The success of this strategy relies heavily on the model's invariance to image pixel masking. In this paper, we take a closer look at model training schemes to improve this invariance. Instead of using Random Cutout arXiv:1708.04552v2 [cs.CV] augmentations like PatchCleanser, we introduce the notion of worst-case masking, i.e., selecting masked images which maximize classification loss. However, finding worst-case masks requires an exhaustive search, which might be prohibitively expensive to do on-the-fly during training. To solve this problem, we propose a two-round greedy masking strategy (Greedy Cutout) which finds an approximate worst-case mask location with much less compute. We show that the models trained with our Greedy Cutout improves certified robust accuracy over Random Cutout in PatchCleanser across a range of datasets and architectures. Certified robust accuracy on ImageNet with a ViT-B16-224 model increases from 58.1\% to 62.3\% against a 3\% square patch applied anywhere on the image.
Property inference attacks allow an adversary to extract global properties of the training dataset from a machine learning model. Such attacks have privacy implications for data owners sharing their datasets to train machine learning models. Several existing approaches for property inference attacks against deep neural networks have been proposed, but they all rely on the attacker training a large number of shadow models, which induces a large computational overhead. In this paper, we consider the setting of property inference attacks in which the attacker can poison a subset of the training dataset and query the trained target model. Motivated by our theoretical analysis of model confidences under poisoning, we design an efficient property inference attack, SNAP, which obtains higher attack success and requires lower amounts of poisoning than the state-of-the-art poisoning-based property inference attack by Mahloujifar et al. For example, on the Census dataset, SNAP achieves 34% higher success rate than Mahloujifar et al. while being 56.5x faster. We also extend our attack to infer whether a certain property was present at all during training and estimate the exact proportion of a property of interest efficiently. We evaluate our attack on several properties of varying proportions from four datasets and demonstrate SNAP's generality and effectiveness. An open-source implementation of SNAP can be found at //github.com/johnmath/snap-sp23.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.
As data are increasingly being stored in different silos and societies becoming more aware of data privacy issues, the traditional centralized training of artificial intelligence (AI) models is facing efficiency and privacy challenges. Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an alternative solution and continue to thrive in this new reality. Existing FL protocol design has been shown to be vulnerable to adversaries within or outside of the system, compromising data privacy and system robustness. Besides training powerful global models, it is of paramount importance to design FL systems that have privacy guarantees and are resistant to different types of adversaries. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on this topic. Through a concise introduction to the concept of FL, and a unique taxonomy covering: 1) threat models; 2) poisoning attacks and defenses against robustness; 3) inference attacks and defenses against privacy, we provide an accessible review of this important topic. We highlight the intuitions, key techniques as well as fundamental assumptions adopted by various attacks and defenses. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions towards robust and privacy-preserving federated learning.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. Existing neural networks mainly operate in the spatial domain with fixed input sizes. For practical applications, images are usually large and have to be downsampled to the predetermined input size of neural networks. Even though the downsampling operations reduce computation and the required communication bandwidth, it removes both redundant and salient information obliviously, which results in accuracy degradation. Inspired by digital signal processing theories, we analyze the spectral bias from the frequency perspective and propose a learning-based frequency selection method to identify the trivial frequency components which can be removed without accuracy loss. The proposed method of learning in the frequency domain leverages identical structures of the well-known neural networks, such as ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and Mask R-CNN, while accepting the frequency-domain information as the input. Experiment results show that learning in the frequency domain with static channel selection can achieve higher accuracy than the conventional spatial downsampling approach and meanwhile further reduce the input data size. Specifically for ImageNet classification with the same input size, the proposed method achieves 1.41% and 0.66% top-1 accuracy improvements on ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. Even with half input size, the proposed method still improves the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50 by 1%. In addition, we observe a 0.8% average precision improvement on Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation on the COCO dataset.
Adversarial attacks to image classification systems present challenges to convolutional networks and opportunities for understanding them. This study suggests that adversarial perturbations on images lead to noise in the features constructed by these networks. Motivated by this observation, we develop new network architectures that increase adversarial robustness by performing feature denoising. Specifically, our networks contain blocks that denoise the features using non-local means or other filters; the entire networks are trained end-to-end. When combined with adversarial training, our feature denoising networks substantially improve the state-of-the-art in adversarial robustness in both white-box and black-box attack settings. On ImageNet, under 10-iteration PGD white-box attacks where prior art has 27.9% accuracy, our method achieves 55.7%; even under extreme 2000-iteration PGD white-box attacks, our method secures 42.6% accuracy. A network based on our method was ranked first in Competition on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses (CAAD) 2018 --- it achieved 50.6% classification accuracy on a secret, ImageNet-like test dataset against 48 unknown attackers, surpassing the runner-up approach by ~10%. Code and models will be made publicly available.