No Arabic abstract
Artificial Intelligence systems require a through assessment of different pillars of trust, namely, fairness, interpretability, data and model privacy, reliability (safety) and robustness against against adversarial attacks. While these research problems have been extensively studied in isolation, an understanding of the trade-off between different pillars of trust is lacking. To this extent, the trade-off between fault tolerance, privacy and adversarial robustness is evaluated for the specific case of Deep Neural Networks, by considering two adversarial settings under a security and a privacy threat model. Specifically, this work studies the impact of the fault tolerance of the Neural Network on training the model by adding noise to the input (Adversarial Robustness) and noise to the gradients (Differential Privacy). While training models with noise to inputs, gradients or weights enhances fault tolerance, it is observed that adversarial robustness and fault tolerance are at odds with each other. On the other hand, ($epsilon,delta$)-Differentially Private models enhance the fault tolerance, measured using generalisation error, theoretically has an upper bound of $e^{epsilon} - 1 + delta$. This novel study of the trade-off between different elements of trust is pivotal for training a model which satisfies the requirements for different pillars of trust simultaneously.
Deep Learning Accelerators are prone to faults which manifest in the form of errors in Neural Networks. Fault Tolerance in Neural Networks is crucial in real-time safety critical applications requiring computation for long durations. Neural Networks with high regularisation exhibit superior fault tolerance, however, at the cost of classification accuracy. In the view of difference in functionality, a Neural Network is modelled as two separate networks, i.e, the Feature Extractor with unsupervised learning objective and the Classifier with a supervised learning objective. Traditional approaches of training the entire network using a single supervised learning objective is insufficient to achieve the objectives of the individual components optimally. In this work, a novel multi-criteria objective function, combining unsupervised training of the Feature Extractor followed by supervised tuning with Classifier Network is proposed. The unsupervised training solves two games simultaneously in the presence of adversary neural networks with conflicting objectives to the Feature Extractor. The first game minimises the loss in reconstructing the input image for indistinguishability given the features from the Extractor, in the presence of a generative decoder. The second game solves a minimax constraint optimisation for distributional smoothening of feature space to match a prior distribution, in the presence of a Discriminator network. The resultant strongly regularised Feature Extractor is combined with the Classifier Network for supervised fine-tuning. The proposed Adversarial Fault Tolerant Neural Network Training is scalable to large networks and is independent of the architecture. The evaluation on benchmarking datasets: FashionMNIST and CIFAR10, indicates that the resultant networks have high accuracy with superior tolerance to stuck at 0 faults compared to widely used regularisers.
Neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable against fault injection attacks. These attacks change the physical behavior of the device during the computation, resulting in a change of value that is currently being computed. They can be realized by various fault injection techniques, ranging from clock/voltage glitching to application of lasers to rowhammer. In this paper we explore the possibility to reverse engineer neural networks with the usage of fault attacks. SNIFF stands for sign bit flip fault, which enables the reverse engineering by changing the sign of intermediate values. We develop the first exact extraction method on deep-layer feature extractor networks that provably allows the recovery of the model parameters. Our experiments with Keras library show that the precision error for the parameter recovery for the tested networks is less than $10^{-13}$ with the usage of 64-bit floats, which improves the current state of the art by 6 orders of magnitude. Additionally, we discuss the protection techniques against fault injection attacks that can be applied to enhance the fault resistance.
As deep learning systems are widely adopted in safety- and security-critical applications, such as autonomous vehicles, banking systems, etc., malicious faults and attacks become a tremendous concern, which potentially could lead to catastrophic consequences. In this paper, we initiate the first study of leveraging physical fault injection attacks on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), by using laser injection technique on embedded systems. In particular, our exploratory study targets four widely used activation functions in DNNs development, that are the general main building block of DNNs that creates non-linear behaviors -- ReLu, softmax, sigmoid, and tanh. Our results show that by targeting these functions, it is possible to achieve a misclassification by injecting faults into the hidden layer of the network. Such result can have practical implications for real-world applications, where faults can be introduced by simpler means (such as altering the supply voltage).
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known vulnerable to adversarial attacks. That is, adversarial examples, obtained by adding delicately crafted distortions onto original legal inputs, can mislead a DNN to classify them as any target labels. This work provides a solution to hardening DNNs under adversarial attacks through defensive dropout. Besides using dropout during training for the best test accuracy, we propose to use dropout also at test time to achieve strong defense effects. We consider the problem of building robust DNNs as an attacker-defender two-player game, where the attacker and the defender know each others strategies and try to optimize their own strategies towards an equilibrium. Based on the observations of the effect of test dropout rate on test accuracy and attack success rate, we propose a defensive dropout algorithm to determine an optimal test dropout rate given the neural network model and the attackers strategy for generating adversarial examples.We also investigate the mechanism behind the outstanding defense effects achieved by the proposed defensive dropout. Comparing with stochastic activation pruning (SAP), another defense method through introducing randomness into the DNN model, we find that our defensive dropout achieves much larger variances of the gradients, which is the key for the improved defense effects (much lower attack success rate). For example, our defensive dropout can reduce the attack success rate from 100% to 13.89% under the currently strongest attack i.e., C&W attack on MNIST dataset.
The vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) to adversarial examples is well documented. Under the strong white-box threat model, where attackers have full access to DNN internals, recent work has produced continual advancements in defenses, often followed by more powerful attacks that break them. Meanwhile, research on the more realistic black-box threat model has focused almost entirely on reducing the query-cost of attacks, making them increasingly practical for ML models already deployed today. This paper proposes and evaluates Blacklight, a new defense against black-box adversarial attacks. Blacklight targets a key property of black-box attacks: to compute adversarial examples, they produce sequences of highly similar images while trying to minimize the distance from some initial benign input. To detect an attack, Blacklight computes for each query image a compact set of one-way hash values that form a probabilistic fingerprint. Variants of an image produce nearly identical fingerprints, and fingerprint generation is robust against manipulation. We evaluate Blacklight on 5 state-of-the-art black-box attacks, across a variety of models and classification tasks. While the most efficient attacks take thousands or tens of thousands of queries to complete, Blacklight identifies them all, often after only a handful of queries. Blacklight is also robust against several powerful countermeasures, including an optimal black-box attack that approximates white-box attacks in efficiency. Finally, Blacklight significantly outperforms the only known alternative in both detection coverage of attack queries and resistance against persistent attackers.