Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Zhen Xiang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhen Xiang.

61 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2020

L-RED: Efficient Post-Training Detection of Imperceptible Backdoor Attacks without Access to the Training Set

Backdoor attacks (BAs) are an emerging form of adversarial attack typically against deep neural network image classifiers. The attacker aims to have the classifier learn to classify to a target class when test images from one or more source classes contain a backdoor pattern, while maintaining high accuracy on all clean test images. Reverse-Engineering-based Defenses (REDs) against BAs do not require access to the training set but only to an independent clean dataset. Unfortunately, most existing REDs rely on an unrealistic assumption that all classes except the target class are source classes of the attack. REDs that do not rely on this assumption often require a large set of clean images and heavy computation. In this paper, we propose a Lagrangian-based RED (L-RED) that does not require knowledge of the number of source classes (or whether an attack is present). Our defense requires very few clean images to effectively detect BAs and is computationally efficient. Notably, we detect 56 out of 60 BAs using only two clean images per class in our experiments on CIFAR-10.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2020

Reverse Engineering Imperceptible Backdoor Attacks on Deep Neural Networks for Detection and Training Set Cleansing

Backdoor data poisoning is an emerging form of adversarial attack usually against deep neural network image classifiers. The attacker poisons the training set with a relatively small set of images from one (or several) source class(es), embedded with a backdoor pattern and labeled to a target class. For a successful attack, during operation, the trained classifier will: 1) misclassify a test image from the source class(es) to the target class whenever the same backdoor pattern is present; 2) maintain a high classification accuracy for backdoor-free test images. In this paper, we make a break-through in defending backdoor attacks with imperceptible backdoor patterns (e.g. watermarks) before/during the training phase. This is a challenging problem because it is a priori unknown which subset (if any) of the training set has been poisoned. We propose an optimization-based reverse-engineering defense, that jointly: 1) detects whether the training set is poisoned; 2) if so, identifies the target class and the training images with the backdoor pattern embedded; and 3) additionally, reversely engineers an estimate of the backdoor pattern used by the attacker. In benchmark experiments on CIFAR-10, for a large variety of attacks, our defense achieves a new state-of-the-art by reducing the attack success rate to no more than 4.9% after removing detected suspicious training images.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2020

Detection of Backdoors in Trained Classifiers Without Access to the Training Set

Recently, a special type of data poisoning (DP) attack targeting Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers, known as a backdoor, was proposed. These attacks do not seek to degrade classification accuracy, but rather to have the classifier learn to classify to a target class whenever the backdoor pattern is present in a test example. Launching backdoor attacks does not require knowledge of the classifier or its training process - it only needs the ability to poison the training set with (a sufficient number of) exemplars containing a sufficiently strong backdoor pattern (labeled with the target class). Here we address post-training detection of backdoor attacks in DNN image classifiers, seldom considered in existing works, wherein the defender does not have access to the poisoned training set, but only to the trained classifier itself, as well as to clean examples from the classification domain. This is an important scenario because a trained classifier may be the basis of e.g. a phone app that will be shared with many users. Detecting backdoors post-training may thus reveal a widespread attack. We propose a purely unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) defense against imperceptible backdoor attacks that: i) detects whether the trained DNN has been backdoor-attacked; ii) infers the source and target classes involved in a detected attack; iii) we even demonstrate it is possible to accurately estimate the backdoor pattern. We test our AD approach, in comparison with alternative defenses, for several backdoor patterns, data sets, and attack settings and demonstrate its favorability. Our defense essentially requires setting a single hyperparameter (the detection threshold), which can e.g. be chosen to fix the system's false positive rate.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2020

Revealing Perceptible Backdoors, without the Training Set, via the Maximum Achievable Misclassification Fraction Statistic

Recently, a backdoor data poisoning attack was proposed, which adds mislabeled examples to the training set, with an embedded backdoor pattern, aiming to have the classifier learn to classify to a target class whenever the backdoor pattern is present in a test sample. Here, we address post-training detection of innocuous perceptible backdoors in DNN image classifiers, wherein the defender does not have access to the poisoned training set, but only to the trained classifier, as well as unpoisoned examples. This problem is challenging because without the poisoned training set, we have no hint about the actual backdoor pattern used during training. This post-training scenario is also of great import because in many practical contexts the DNN user did not train the DNN and does not have access to the training data. We identify two important properties of perceptible backdoor patterns - spatial invariance and robustness - based upon which we propose a novel detector using the maximum achievable misclassification fraction (MAMF) statistic. We detect whether the trained DNN has been backdoor-attacked and infer the source and target classes. Our detector outperforms other existing detectors and, coupled with an imperceptible backdoor detector, helps achieve post-training detection of all evasive backdoors.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

Adversarial Learning in Statistical Classification: A Comprehensive Review of Defenses Against Attacks

There is great potential for damage from adversarial learning (AL) attacks on machine-learning based systems. In this paper, we provide a contemporary survey of AL, focused particularly on defenses against attacks on statistical classifiers. After introducing relevant terminology and the goals and range of possible knowledge of both attackers and defenders, we survey recent work on test-time evasion (TTE), data poisoning (DP), and reverse engineering (RE) attacks and particularly defenses against same. In so doing, we distinguish robust classification from anomaly detection (AD), unsupervised from supervised, and statistical hypothesis-based defenses from ones that do not have an explicit null (no attack) hypothesis; we identify the hyperparameters a particular method requires, its computational complexity, as well as the performance measures on which it was evaluated and the obtained quality. We then dig deeper, providing novel insights that challenge conventional AL wisdom and that target unresolved issues, including: 1) robust classification versus AD as a defense strategy; 2) the belief that attack success increases with attack strength, which ignores susceptibility to AD; 3) small perturbations for test-time evasion attacks: a fallacy or a requirement?; 4) validity of the universal assumption that a TTE attacker knows the ground-truth class for the example to be attacked; 5) black, grey, or white box attacks as the standard for defense evaluation; 6) susceptibility of query-based RE to an AD defense. We also discuss attacks on the privacy of training data. We then present benchmark comparisons of several defenses against TTE, RE, and backdoor DP attacks on images. The paper concludes with a discussion of future work.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2018

A Mixture Model Based Defense for Data Poisoning Attacks Against Naive Bayes Spam Filters

Naive Bayes spam filters are highly susceptible to data poisoning attacks. Here, known spam sources/blacklisted IPs exploit the fact that their received emails will be treated as (ground truth) labeled spam examples, and used for classifier training (or re-training). The attacking source thus generates emails that will skew the spam model, potentially resulting in great degradation in classifier accuracy. Such attacks are successful mainly because of the poor representation power of the naive Bayes (NB) model, with only a single (component) density to represent spam (plus a possible attack). We propose a defense based on the use of a mixture of NB models. We demonstrate that the learned mixture almost completely isolates the attack in a second NB component, with the original spam component essentially unchanged by the attack. Our approach addresses both the scenario where the classifier is being re-trained in light of new data and, significantly, the more challenging scenario where the attack is embedded in the original spam training set. Even for weak attack strengths, BIC-based model order selection chooses a two-component solution, which invokes the mixture-based defense. Promising results are presented on the TREC 2005 spam corpus.

cs.CR↗