With the growing adoption of AI and machine learning systems in real-world applications, ensuring their fairness has become increasingly critical. The majority of the work in algorithmic fairness focus on assessing and improving the fairness of machine learning systems. There is relatively little research on fairness vulnerability, i.e., how an AI system's fairness can be intentionally compromised. In this work, we first provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that a simple adversarial poisoning strategy is sufficient to induce maximally unfair behavior in naive Bayes classifiers. Our key idea is to strategically inject a small fraction of carefully crafted adversarial data points into the training set, biasing the model's decision boundary to disproportionately affect a protected group while preserving generalizable performance. To illustrate the practical effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments across several benchmark datasets and models. We find that our attack significantly outperforms existing methods in degrading fairness metrics across multiple models and datasets, often achieving substantially higher levels of unfairness with a comparable or only slightly worse impact on accuracy. Notably, our method proves effective on a wide range of models, in contrast to prior work, demonstrating a robust and potent approach to compromising the fairness of machine learning systems.
University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）；Fordham University（福特汉姆大学）
Many state-of-the-art ML models have outperformed humans in various tasks such as image classification. With such outstanding performance, ML models are widely used today. However, the existence of adversarial attacks and data poisoning attacks really questions the robustness of ML models. For instance, Engstrom et al. demonstrated that state-of-the-art image classifiers could be easily fooled by a small rotation on an arbitrary image. As ML systems are being increasingly integrated into safety and security-sensitive applications, adversarial attacks and data poisoning attacks pose a considera…
Tulane University（杜兰大学）；Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Predictions of certifiably robust classifiers remain constant in a neighborhood of a point, making them resilient to test-time attacks with a guarantee. In this work, we present a previously unrecognized threat to robust machine learning models that highlights the importance of training-data quality in achieving high certified adversarial robustness. Specifically, we propose a novel bilevel optimization-based data poisoning attack that degrades the robustness guarantees of certifiably robust classifiers. Unlike other poisoning attacks that reduce the accuracy of the poisoned models on a small …
Federated learning, as a distributed learning that conducts the training on the local devices without accessing to the training data, is vulnerable to Byzatine poisoning adversarial attacks. We argue that the federated learning model has to avoid those kind of adversarial attacks through filtering out the adversarial clients by means of the federated aggregation operator. We propose a dynamic federated aggregation operator that dynamically discards those adversarial clients and allows to prevent the corruption of the global learning model. We assess it as a defense against adversarial attacks …
University of California Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Tagliatela College of Engineering（塔利亚泰拉工程学院）；University of New Haven（纽黑文大学）
State-of-the-art machine learning models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks whose purpose is to undermine the integrity of the model. However, the current literature on data poisoning attacks is mainly focused on ad hoc techniques that are only applicable to specific machine learning models. Additionally, the existing data poisoning attacks in the literature are limited to either binary classifiers or to gradient-based algorithms. To address these limitations, this paper first proposes a novel model-free label-flipping attack based on the multi-modality of the data, in which the adversar…
Machine learning has been widely applied in wireless communications. However, the security aspects of machine learning in wireless applications have not been well understood yet. We consider the case that a cognitive transmitter senses the spectrum and transmits on idle channels determined by a machine learning algorithm. We present an adversarial machine learning approach to launch a spectrum data poisoning attack by inferring the transmitter's behavior and attempting to falsify the spectrum sensing data over the air. For that purpose, the adversary transmits for a short period of time when t…
University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）；U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory（美国空军研究实验室）
Deep neural networks usually require large labeled datasets for training to achieve state-of-the-art performance in many tasks, such as image classification and natural language processing. Although a lot of data is created each day by active Internet users, most of these data are unlabeled and are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. In this paper, we develop an efficient active learning method that requires fewer labeled instances and incorporates the technique of adversarial retraining in which additional labeled artificial data are generated without increasing the budget of the labeling. …
Data poisoning attacks aim to manipulate the model produced by a learning algorithm by adversarially modifying the training set. We consider differential privacy as a defensive measure against this type of attack. We show that such learners are resistant to data poisoning attacks when the adversary is only able to poison a small number of items. However, this protection degrades as the adversary poisons more data. To illustrate, we design attack algorithms targeting objective and output perturbation learners, two standard approaches to differentially-private machine learning. Experiments show …
Using Anomaly Detection to Detect Poisoning Attacks in Federated Learning Applications
Honda Research Institute EU（本田欧洲研究所）；University of Kent（肯特大学）；University of Lille（里尔大学）；ENSAIT；Dong A University（东亚大学）；International Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science（人工智能与数据科学国际研究院）
We consider data poisoning attacks, a class of adversarial attacks on machine learning where an adversary has the power to alter a small fraction of the training data in order to make the trained classifier satisfy certain objectives. While there has been much prior work on data poisoning, most of it is in the offline setting, and attacks for online learning, where training data arrives in a streaming manner, are not well understood. In this work, we initiate a systematic investigation of data poisoning attacks for online learning. We formalize the problem into two settings, and we propose a g…
New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）
In this work, we show how to jointly exploit adversarial perturbation and model poisoning vulnerabilities to practically launch a new stealthy attack, dubbed AdvTrojan. AdvTrojan is stealthy because it can be activated only when: 1) a carefully crafted adversarial perturbation is injected into the input examples during inference, and 2) a Trojan backdoor is implanted during the training process of the model. We leverage adversarial noise in the input space to move Trojan-infected examples across the model decision boundary, making it difficult to detect. The stealthiness behavior of AdvTrojan …
Data-Agnostic Model Poisoning against Federated Learning: A Graph Autoencoder Approach
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Real-Time and Embedded Computing Systems Research Centre (CISTER)（实时与嵌入式计算系统研究中心（CISTER））；CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学CyLab安全与隐私研究所）；Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)（联邦科学与工业研究组织（CSIRO））；Koç University（科奇大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
In this work, we study the possibility of defending against data-poisoning attacks while training a shallow neural network in a regression setup. We focus on doing supervised learning for a class of depth-2 finite-width neural networks, which includes single-filter convolutional networks. In this class of networks, we attempt to learn the network weights in the presence of a malicious oracle doing stochastic, bounded and additive adversarial distortions on the true output during training. For the non-gradient stochastic algorithm that we construct, we prove worst-case near-optimal trade-offs a…
University of Singapore（新加坡大学）；Ant financial（蚂蚁金融）
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging practical framework for effective and scalable machine learning among multiple participants, such as end users, organizations and companies. However, most existing FL or distributed learning frameworks have not well addressed two important issues together: collaborative fairness and adversarial robustness (e.g. free-riders and malicious participants). In conventional FL, all participants receive the global model (equal rewards), which might be unfair to the high-contributing participants. Furthermore, due to the lack of a safeguard mechanism, free-riders …
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Information Sciences Institute（信息科学研究所）
Algorithmic fairness has attracted significant attention in recent years, with many quantitative measures suggested for characterizing the fairness of different machine learning algorithms. Despite this interest, the robustness of those fairness measures with respect to an intentional adversarial attack has not been properly addressed. Indeed, most adversarial machine learning has focused on the impact of malicious attacks on the accuracy of the system, without any regard to the system's fairness. We propose new types of data poisoning attacks where an adversary intentionally targets the fairn…
Data poisoning and backdoor attacks manipulate training data in order to cause models to fail during inference. A recent survey of industry practitioners found that data poisoning is the number one concern among threats ranging from model stealing to adversarial attacks. However, it remains unclear exactly how dangerous poisoning methods are and which ones are more effective considering that these methods, even ones with identical objectives, have not been tested in consistent or realistic settings. We observe that data poisoning and backdoor attacks are highly sensitive to variations in the t…
Toyota Technological Institute Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
A backdoor data poisoning attack is an adversarial attack wherein the attacker injects several watermarked, mislabeled training examples into a training set. The watermark does not impact the test-time performance of the model on typical data; however, the model reliably errs on watermarked examples. To gain a better foundational understanding of backdoor data poisoning attacks, we present a formal theoretical framework within which one can discuss backdoor data poisoning attacks for classification problems. We then use this to analyze important statistical and computational issues surrounding…
Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）；Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学）
Federated Learning (FL) is a paradigm in Machine Learning (ML) that addresses data privacy, security, access rights and access to heterogeneous information issues by training a global model using distributed nodes. Despite its advantages, there is an increased potential for cyberattacks on FL-based ML techniques that can undermine the benefits. Model-poisoning attacks on FL target the availability of the model. The adversarial objective is to disrupt the training. We propose attestedFL, a defense mechanism that monitors the training of individual nodes through state persistence in order to det…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
While recent works have indicated that federated learning (FL) may be vulnerable to poisoning attacks by compromised clients, their real impact on production FL systems is not fully understood. In this work, we aim to develop a comprehensive systemization for poisoning attacks on FL by enumerating all possible threat models, variations of poisoning, and adversary capabilities. We specifically put our focus on untargeted poisoning attacks, as we argue that they are significantly relevant to production FL deployments. We present a critical analysis of untargeted poisoning attacks under practical…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Sony AI（索尼人工智能）；USTC（中国科学技术大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
Vertical federated learning (VFL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm that can learn models from features distributed on different platforms in a privacy-preserving way. Since in real-world applications the data may contain bias on fairness-sensitive features (e.g., gender), VFL models may inherit bias from training data and become unfair for some user groups. However, existing fair machine learning methods usually rely on the centralized storage of fairness-sensitive features to achieve model fairness, which are usually inapplicable in federated scenarios. In this paper, we prop…
Universitat Pomepu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Università degli Studi di Cagliari（卡利亚里大学）
Research in adversarial machine learning has shown how the performance of machine learning models can be seriously compromised by injecting even a small fraction of poisoning points into the training data. While the effects on model accuracy of such poisoning attacks have been widely studied, their potential effects on other model performance metrics remain to be evaluated. In this work, we introduce an optimization framework for poisoning attacks against algorithmic fairness, and develop a gradient-based poisoning attack aimed at introducing classification disparities among different groups i…
University of Arkansas at Fayetteville（阿肯色大学费耶特维尔分校）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
Both fair machine learning and adversarial learning have been extensively studied. However, attacking fair machine learning models has received less attention. In this paper, we present a framework that seeks to effectively generate poisoning samples to attack both model accuracy and algorithmic fairness. Our attacking framework can target fair machine learning models trained with a variety of group based fairness notions such as demographic parity and equalized odds. We develop three online attacks, adversarial sampling , adversarial labeling, and adversarial feature modification. All three a…
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi（德里英德拉普拉斯塔信息技术学院）
Learning low-level node embeddings using techniques from network representation learning is useful for solving downstream tasks such as node classification and link prediction. An important consideration in such applications is the robustness of the embedding algorithms against adversarial attacks, which can be examined by performing perturbation on the original network. An efficient perturbation technique can degrade the performance of network embeddings on downstream tasks. In this paper, we study network embedding algorithms from an adversarial point of view and observe the effect of poison…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；DIEE, University of Cagliari（卡利亚里大学电气与电子工程系）；Pluribus One
A number of online services nowadays rely upon machine learning to extract valuable information from data collected in the wild. This exposes learning algorithms to the threat of data poisoning, i.e., a coordinate attack in which a fraction of the training data is controlled by the attacker and manipulated to subvert the learning process. To date, these attacks have been devised only against a limited class of binary learning algorithms, due to the inherent complexity of the gradient-based procedure used to optimize the poisoning points (a.k.a. adversarial training examples). In this work, we …
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Siegen（锡根大学）
The adversarial machine learning literature is largely partitioned into evasion attacks on testing data and poisoning attacks on training data. In this work, we show that adversarial examples, originally intended for attacking pre-trained models, are even more effective for data poisoning than recent methods designed specifically for poisoning. Our findings indicate that adversarial examples, when assigned the original label of their natural base image, cannot be used to train a classifier for natural images. Furthermore, when adversarial examples are assigned their adversarial class label, th…
Fair classification aims to stress the classification models to achieve the equality (treatment or prediction quality) among different sensitive groups. However, fair classification can be under the risk of poisoning attacks that deliberately insert malicious training samples to manipulate the trained classifiers' performance. In this work, we study the poisoning scenario where the attacker can insert a small fraction of samples into training data, with arbitrary sensitive attributes as well as other predictive features. We demonstrate that the fairly trained classifiers can be greatly vulnera…
University of Siegen（锡根大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
Data poisoning is a threat model in which a malicious actor tampers with training data to manipulate outcomes at inference time. A variety of defenses against this threat model have been proposed, but each suffers from at least one of the following flaws: they are easily overcome by adaptive attacks, they severely reduce testing performance, or they cannot generalize to diverse data poisoning threat models. Adversarial training, and its variants, are currently considered the only empirically strong defense against (inference-time) adversarial attacks. In this work, we extend the adversarial tr…
Continuous learning from streaming data is among the most challenging topics in the contemporary machine learning. In this domain, learning algorithms must not only be able to handle massive volumes of rapidly arriving data, but also adapt themselves to potential emerging changes. The phenomenon of the evolving nature of data streams is known as concept drift. While there is a plethora of methods designed for detecting its occurrence, all of them assume that the drift is connected with underlying changes in the source of data. However, one must consider the possibility of a malicious injection…
Fairis: Fairness-Aware Aggregation with Provable Influence Containment against Fairness Poisoning Attacks in Collaborative Machine Learning
Bowie State University（鲍伊州立大学）；Télécom SudParis（南巴黎电信学院）；Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎综合理工学院）；Brown University（布朗大学）；Northern Virginia Community College（北弗吉尼亚社区学院）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Hasso Plattner Institut, University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学哈索·普拉特纳研究所）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
Machine learning algorithms are vulnerable to poisoning attacks: An adversary can inject malicious points in the training dataset to influence the learning process and degrade the algorithm's performance. Optimal poisoning attacks have already been proposed to evaluate worst-case scenarios, modelling attacks as a bi-level optimization problem. Solving these problems is computationally demanding and has limited applicability for some models such as deep networks. In this paper we introduce a novel generative model to craft systematic poisoning attacks against machine learning classifiers genera…
Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Engineering（巴拉蒂维迪佩斯工程学院）；IIT Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校）
Traditional adversarial attacks rely upon the perturbations generated by gradients from the network which are generally safeguarded by gradient guided search to provide an adversarial counterpart to the network. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism of generating adversarial examples where the actual image is not corrupted rather its latent space representation is utilized to tamper with the inherent structure of the image while maintaining the perceptual quality intact and to act as legitimate data samples. As opposed to gradient-based attacks, the latent space poisoning exploits the in…
This paper examines the robustness of deployed few-shot meta-learning systems when they are fed an imperceptibly perturbed few-shot dataset. We attack amortized meta-learners, which allows us to craft colluding sets of inputs that are tailored to fool the system's learning algorithm when used as training data. Jointly crafted adversarial inputs might be expected to synergistically manipulate a classifier, allowing for very strong data-poisoning attacks that would be hard to detect. We show that in a white box setting, these attacks are very successful and can cause the target model's predictio…
Multimodal contrastive learning methods like CLIP train on noisy and uncurated training datasets. This is cheaper than labeling datasets manually, and even improves out-of-distribution robustness. We show that this practice makes backdoor and poisoning attacks a significant threat. By poisoning just 0.01% of a dataset (e.g., just 300 images of the 3 million-example Conceptual Captions dataset), we can cause the model to misclassify test images by overlaying a small patch. Targeted poisoning attacks, whereby the model misclassifies a particular test input with an adversarially-desired label, ar…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of Cagliari（卡利亚里大学）；Pluribus One
Transferability captures the ability of an attack against a machine-learning model to be effective against a different, potentially unknown, model. Empirical evidence for transferability has been shown in previous work, but the underlying reasons why an attack transfers or not are not yet well understood. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis aimed to investigate the transferability of both test-time evasion and training-time poisoning attacks. We provide a unifying optimization framework for evasion and poisoning attacks, and a formal definition of transferability of such attacks…
The goal of network representation learning is to learn low-dimensional node embeddings that capture the graph structure and are useful for solving downstream tasks. However, despite the proliferation of such methods, there is currently no study of their robustness to adversarial attacks. We provide the first adversarial vulnerability analysis on the widely used family of methods based on random walks. We derive efficient adversarial perturbations that poison the network structure and have a negative effect on both the quality of the embeddings and the downstream tasks. We further show that ou…
Machine learning has become an important component for many systems and applications including computer vision, spam filtering, malware and network intrusion detection, among others. Despite the capabilities of machine learning algorithms to extract valuable information from data and produce accurate predictions, it has been shown that these algorithms are vulnerable to attacks. Data poisoning is one of the most relevant security threats against machine learning systems, where attackers can subvert the learning process by injecting malicious samples in the training data. Recent work in adversa…
Graph convolutional neural networks, which learn aggregations over neighbor nodes, have achieved great performance in node classification tasks. However, recent studies reported that such graph convolutional node classifier can be deceived by adversarial perturbations on graphs. Abusing graph convolutions, a node's classification result can be influenced by poisoning its neighbors. Given an attributed graph and a node classifier, how can we evaluate robustness against such indirect adversarial attacks? Can we generate strong adversarial perturbations which are effective on not only one-hop nei…
