arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Nicholas Carlini.
MagNet and "Efficient Defenses..." were recently proposed as a defense to adversarial examples. We find that we can construct adversarial examples that defeat these defenses with only a slight increase in distortion.
Neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples: inputs that are close to natural inputs but classified incorrectly. In order to better understand the space of adversarial examples, we survey ten recent proposals that are designed for detection and compare their efficacy. We show that all can be defeated by constructing new loss functions. We conclude that adversarial examples are significantly harder to detect than previously appreciated, and the properties believed to be intrinsic to adversarial examples are in fact not. Finally, we propose several simple guidelines for evaluating future proposed defenses.
Ongoing research has proposed several methods to defend neural networks against adversarial examples, many of which researchers have shown to be ineffective. We ask whether a strong defense can be created by combining multiple (possibly weak) defenses. To answer this question, we study three defenses that follow this approach. Two of these are recently proposed defenses that intentionally combine components designed to work well together. A third defense combines three independent defenses. For all the components of these defenses and the combined defenses themselves, we show that an adaptive adversary can create adversarial examples successfully with low distortion. Thus, our work implies that ensemble of weak defenses is not sufficient to provide strong defense against adversarial examples.
Neural networks provide state-of-the-art results for most machine learning tasks. Unfortunately, neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples: given an input $x$ and any target classification $t$, it is possible to find a new input $x'$ that is similar to $x$ but classified as $t$. This makes it difficult to apply neural networks in security-critical areas. Defensive distillation is a recently proposed approach that can take an arbitrary neural network, and increase its robustness, reducing the success rate of current attacks' ability to find adversarial examples from $95\%$ to $0.5\%$. In this paper, we demonstrate that defensive distillation does not significantly increase the robustness of neural networks by introducing three new attack algorithms that are successful on both distilled and undistilled neural networks with $100\%$ probability. Our attacks are tailored to three distance metrics used previously in the literature, and when compared to previous adversarial example generation algorithms, our attacks are often much more effective (and never worse). Furthermore, we propose using high-confidence adversarial examples in a simple transferability test we show can also be used to break defensive distillation. We hope our attacks will be used as a benchmark in future defense attempts to create neural networks that resist adversarial examples.
We show that defensive distillation is not secure: it is no more resistant to targeted misclassification attacks than unprotected neural networks.