Data poisoning is one of the most relevant security threats against machine learning and data-driven technologies. Since many applications rely on untrusted training data, an attacker can easily craft malicious samples and inject them into the training dataset to degrade the performance of machine learning models. As recent work has shown, such Denial-of-Service (DoS) data poisoning attacks are highly effective. To mitigate this threat, we propose a new approach of detecting DoS poisoned instances. In comparison to related work, we deviate from clustering and anomaly detection based approaches, which often suffer from the curse of dimensionality and arbitrary anomaly threshold selection. Rather, our defence is based on extracting information from the training data in such a generalized manner that we can identify poisoned samples based on the information present in the unpoisoned portion of the data. We evaluate our defence against two DoS poisoning attacks and seven datasets, and find that it reliably identifies poisoned instances. In comparison to related work, our defence improves false positive / false negative rates by at least 50%, often more.
We study backdoor poisoning attacks against image classification networks, whereby an attacker inserts a trigger into a subset of the training data, in such a way that at test time, this trigger causes the classifier to predict some target class. %There are several techniques proposed in the literature that aim to detect the attack but only a few also propose to defend against it, and they typically involve retraining the network which is not always possible in practice. We propose lightweight automated detection and correction techniques against poisoning attacks, which are based on neuron patterns mined from the network using a small set of clean and poisoned test samples with known labels. The patterns built based on the mis-classified samples are used for run-time detection of new poisoned inputs. For correction, we propose an input correction technique that uses a differential analysis to identify the trigger in the detected poisoned images, which is then reset to a neutral color. Our detection and correction are performed at run-time and input level, which is in contrast to most existing work that is focused on offline model-level defenses. We demonstrate that our technique outperforms existing defenses such as NeuralCleanse and STRIP on popular benchmarks such as MNIST, CIFAR-10, and GTSRB against the popular BadNets attack and the more complex DFST attack.
Black-box adversarial attacks generate adversarial samples via iterative optimizations using repeated queries. Defending deep neural networks against such attacks has been challenging. In this paper, we propose an efficient Boundary Defense (BD) method which mitigates black-box attacks by exploiting the fact that the adversarial optimizations often need samples on the classification boundary. Our method detects the boundary samples as those with low classification confidence and adds white Gaussian noise to their logits. The method's impact on the deep network's classification accuracy is analyzed theoretically. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results show that the BD method can reliably defend against both soft and hard label black-box attacks. It outperforms a list of existing defense methods. For IMAGENET models, by adding zero-mean white Gaussian noise with standard deviation 0.1 to logits when the classification confidence is less than 0.3, the defense reduces the attack success rate to almost 0 while limiting the classification accuracy degradation to around 1 percent.
Machine Learning (ML) has proven to be effective in many application domains. However, ML methods can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in which an attacker tries to fool the classification/prediction mechanism by crafting the input data. In the case of ML-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs), the attacker might use their knowledge of the intrusion detection logic to generate malicious traffic that remains undetected. One way to solve this issue is to adopt adversarial training, in which the training set is augmented with adversarial traffic samples. This paper presents an adversarial training approach called GADoT, which leverages a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to generate adversarial DDoS samples for training. We show that a state-of-the-art NIDS with high accuracy on popular datasets can experience more than 60% undetected malicious flows under adversarial attacks. We then demonstrate how this score drops to 1.8% or less after adversarial training using GADoT.
A key challenge of big data analytics is how to collect a large volume of (labeled) data. Crowdsourcing aims to address this challenge via aggregating and estimating high-quality data (e.g., sentiment label for text) from pervasive clients/users. Existing studies on crowdsourcing focus on designing new methods to improve the aggregated data quality from unreliable/noisy clients. However, the security aspects of such crowdsourcing systems remain under-explored to date. We aim to bridge this gap in this work. Specifically, we show that crowdsourcing is vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, in which malicious clients provide carefully crafted data to corrupt the aggregated data. We formulate our proposed data poisoning attacks as an optimization problem that maximizes the error of the aggregated data. Our evaluation results on one synthetic and two real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed attacks can substantially increase the estimation errors of the aggregated data. We also propose two defenses to reduce the impact of malicious clients. Our empirical results show that the proposed defenses can substantially reduce the estimation errors of the data poisoning attacks.
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.
Recently, NLP has seen a surge in the usage of large pre-trained models. Users download weights of models pre-trained on large datasets, then fine-tune the weights on a task of their choice. This raises the question of whether downloading untrusted pre-trained weights can pose a security threat. In this paper, we show that it is possible to construct ``weight poisoning'' attacks where pre-trained weights are injected with vulnerabilities that expose ``backdoors'' after fine-tuning, enabling the attacker to manipulate the model prediction simply by injecting an arbitrary keyword. We show that by applying a regularization method, which we call RIPPLe, and an initialization procedure, which we call Embedding Surgery, such attacks are possible even with limited knowledge of the dataset and fine-tuning procedure. Our experiments on sentiment classification, toxicity detection, and spam detection show that this attack is widely applicable and poses a serious threat. Finally, we outline practical defenses against such attacks. Code to reproduce our experiments is available at //github.com/neulab/RIPPLe.
There has been an ongoing cycle where stronger defenses against adversarial attacks are subsequently broken by a more advanced defense-aware attack. We present a new approach towards ending this cycle where we "deflect'' adversarial attacks by causing the attacker to produce an input that semantically resembles the attack's target class. To this end, we first propose a stronger defense based on Capsule Networks that combines three detection mechanisms to achieve state-of-the-art detection performance on both standard and defense-aware attacks. We then show that undetected attacks against our defense often perceptually resemble the adversarial target class by performing a human study where participants are asked to label images produced by the attack. These attack images can no longer be called "adversarial'' because our network classifies them the same way as humans do.
In federated learning, multiple client devices jointly learn a machine learning model: each client device maintains a local model for its local training dataset, while a master device maintains a global model via aggregating the local models from the client devices. The machine learning community recently proposed several federated learning methods that were claimed to be robust against Byzantine failures (e.g., system failures, adversarial manipulations) of certain client devices. In this work, we perform the first systematic study on local model poisoning attacks to federated learning. We assume an attacker has compromised some client devices, and the attacker manipulates the local model parameters on the compromised client devices during the learning process such that the global model has a large testing error rate. We formulate our attacks as optimization problems and apply our attacks to four recent Byzantine-robust federated learning methods. Our empirical results on four real-world datasets show that our attacks can substantially increase the error rates of the models learnt by the federated learning methods that were claimed to be robust against Byzantine failures of some client devices. We generalize two defenses for data poisoning attacks to defend against our local model poisoning attacks. Our evaluation results show that one defense can effectively defend against our attacks in some cases, but the defenses are not effective enough in other cases, highlighting the need for new defenses against our local model poisoning attacks to federated learning.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used in many applications. However, their robustness against adversarial attacks is criticized. Prior studies show that using unnoticeable modifications on graph topology or nodal features can significantly reduce the performances of GNNs. It is very challenging to design robust graph neural networks against poisoning attack and several efforts have been taken. Existing work aims at reducing the negative impact from adversarial edges only with the poisoned graph, which is sub-optimal since they fail to discriminate adversarial edges from normal ones. On the other hand, clean graphs from similar domains as the target poisoned graph are usually available in the real world. By perturbing these clean graphs, we create supervised knowledge to train the ability to detect adversarial edges so that the robustness of GNNs is elevated. However, such potential for clean graphs is neglected by existing work. To this end, we investigate a novel problem of improving the robustness of GNNs against poisoning attacks by exploring clean graphs. Specifically, we propose PA-GNN, which relies on a penalized aggregation mechanism that directly restrict the negative impact of adversarial edges by assigning them lower attention coefficients. To optimize PA-GNN for a poisoned graph, we design a meta-optimization algorithm that trains PA-GNN to penalize perturbations using clean graphs and their adversarial counterparts, and transfers such ability to improve the robustness of PA-GNN on the poisoned graph. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the robustness of PA-GNN against poisoning attacks on graphs.
There is a rising interest in studying the robustness of deep neural network classifiers against adversaries, with both advanced attack and defence techniques being actively developed. However, most recent work focuses on discriminative classifiers, which only model the conditional distribution of the labels given the inputs. In this paper we propose the deep Bayes classifier, which improves classical naive Bayes with conditional deep generative models. We further develop detection methods for adversarial examples, which reject inputs that have negative log-likelihood under the generative model exceeding a threshold pre-specified using training data. Experimental results suggest that deep Bayes classifiers are more robust than deep discriminative classifiers, and the proposed detection methods achieve high detection rates against many recently proposed attacks.