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arXiv · 2609.33992

GateDrain: Availability Attacks and Admission-Side Defense for Confidence-Gated Edge-Cloud Inference

Zonghua Gu·Julian Singh-Smith·Junlin Liao·Di Liu
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Abstract

Confidence-gated edge--cloud inference accepts confident local predictions and offloads uncertain inputs to a stronger cloud model. We show that this routing decision creates an availability attack surface. We call this attack \emph{GateDrain}: bounded input perturbations lower calibrated confidence and redirect requests that would otherwise be answered locally into a shared cloud queue, without increasing the application request rate. Because escalated requests share a cloud service, an increase in per-request cloud demand can move a near-capacity deployment across a queueing knee, causing disproportionate tail-latency degradation for benign users. We evaluate white-box, transfer, decision-only, universal, and multi-gate attacks on the public EdgeBoost artifact. A fixed-application-volume comparison isolates the effect of confidence manipulation from added client traffic, while perturbation-budget and arrival-process sweeps show that the queueing transition persists across several workload models but its amplification depends on the operating point. Adaptive attacks also defeat the evaluated training-free preprocessing defenses. To contain the resulting cloud demand, we evaluate Bounded Escalation, which combines per-source admission budgets, protected capacity, and non-preemptive trusted-class priority; an optional global bucket adds an identity-independent bound on untrusted admissions. The evaluation makes the resulting policy trade-off explicit: authenticated clients receive latency isolation, whereas tighter aggregate containment can reject legitimate unauthenticated offloads and reduce overall expected accuracy through edge fallback.

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Zonghua Gu, Julian Singh-Smith, Junlin Liao, Di Liu. 2026-09-27. GateDrain: Availability Attacks and Admission-Side Defense for Confidence-Gated Edge-Cloud Inference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33992

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