The proliferation of IoT devices has fueled distributed edge systems to collect vast amounts of sensitive data, creating fertile ground for on-device machine learning applications. While federated learning (FL) mitigates privacy concerns by exchanging model parameters instead of raw data, we identify a critical blind spot in current research. We examine the most commonly used personalized federated learning (PFL) methods, which allow clients to maintain private, personalized models to address data heterogeneity across clients. Through systematic analysis, we reveal that PFL methods exhibit heightened vulnerability to transfer-based adversarial attacks compared to centralized learning paradigms. Wherein, malicious clients can exploit local model knowledge to craft adversarial examples that can compromise peer clients' personalized models. We establish this vulnerability through both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation across multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating significant accuracy drops across various PFL methods. To address this challenge, we propose a defense framework combining stochastic input noise, input-scaled trace regularization, and parameter sensitivity maximization to improve FL's robustness. Our findings establish the first systematic study of adversarial threats in PFL systems, providing both diagnostic tools and practical countermeasures.
Tongji University（同济大学）；Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Federated Learning (FL) is a popular distributed machine learning paradigm that enables jointly training a global model without sharing clients' data. However, its repetitive server-client communication gives room for backdoor attacks with aim to mislead the global model into a targeted misprediction when a specific trigger pattern is presented. In response to such backdoor threats on federated learning, various defense measures have been proposed. In this paper, we study whether the current defense mechanisms truly neutralize the backdoor threats from federated learning in a practical setting…
Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；Huawei International Pte Ltd（华为国际私人有限公司）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach where multiple clients collaboratively train a joint model without exchanging their data. Despite FL's unprecedented success in data privacy-preserving, its vulnerability to free-rider attacks has attracted increasing attention. Existing defenses may be ineffective against highly camouflaged or high percentages of free riders. To address these challenges, we reconsider the defense from a novel perspective, i.e., model weight evolving frequency.Empirically, we gain a novel insight that during the FL's training, the model weight …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究院）
Personalized federated learning is proposed to handle the data heterogeneity problem amongst clients by learning dedicated tailored local models for each user. However, existing works are often built in a centralized way, leading to high communication pressure and high vulnerability when a failure or an attack on the central server occurs. In this work, we propose a novel personalized federated learning framework in a decentralized (peer-to-peer) communication protocol named Dis-PFL, which employs personalized sparse masks to customize sparse local models on the edge. To further save the commu…
Previous studies demonstrate DNNs' vulnerability to adversarial examples and adversarial training can establish a defense to adversarial examples. In addition, recent studies show that deep neural networks also exhibit vulnerability to parameter corruptions. The vulnerability of model parameters is of crucial value to the study of model robustness and generalization. In this work, we introduce the concept of parameter corruption and propose to leverage the loss change indicators for measuring the flatness of the loss basin and the parameter robustness of neural network parameters. On such basi…
On the Vulnerability of Parameter-Level Defenses to Model Merging
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；NLPR & MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（自动化研究所国家工程实验室及机器智能研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Sichuan University（四川大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to edge-perturbing attacks, such as maliciously inserting or deleting graph edges. However, a theoretical proof of such vulnerability remains a big challenge, and effective defense schemes are still open issues. In this paper, we first generalize the formulation of edge-perturbing attacks and strictly prove the vulnerability of GCNs to such attacks in node classification tasks. Following this, an anonymous graph convolutional network, named AN-GCN, is proposed to counter against edge-perturbing attacks. Speci…
Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）
Recent increases in the computational demands of deep neural networks (DNNs) have sparked interest in efficient deep learning mechanisms, e.g., quantization or pruning. These mechanisms enable the construction of a small, efficient version of commercial-scale models with comparable accuracy, accelerating their deployment to resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we study the security considerations of publishing on-device variants of large-scale models. We first show that an adversary can exploit on-device models to make attacking the large models easier. In evaluations across 19 DNNs, b…
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）；IBM T. J. Watson Research Center（IBM T. J. 沃森研究中心）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant performance in various tasks. However, recent studies have shown that DNNs can be easily fooled by small perturbation on the input, called adversarial attacks. As the extensions of DNNs to graphs, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been demonstrated to inherit this vulnerability. Adversary can mislead GNNs to give wrong predictions by modifying the graph structure such as manipulating a few edges. This vulnerability has arisen tremendous concerns for adapting GNNs in safety-critical applications and has attracted increasing research attentio…
A No-Defense Defense Against Gradient-Based Adversarial Attacks on ML-NIDS: Is Less More?
Carleton University（卡尔顿大学）；Computer Engineering Carleton University Ottawa, Canada（计算机工程系卡尔顿大学渥太华加拿大）；School of Information Technology Carleton University Ottawa, Canada（信息科技学院卡尔顿大学渥太华加拿大）
Lorica: A Synergistic Fine-Tuning Framework for Advancing Personalized Adversarial Robustness
School of Cyber Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学信息科学与技术学院）；School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学自动化学院）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学网络安全工程学院）
Adversarial Vulnerability Transcends Computational Paradigms: Feature Engineering Provides No Defense Against Neural Adversarial Transfer
1 Department of Information \& Computer Science, KFUPM, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia；2 Department of Computer Engineering, KFUPM, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia；3 Interdisciplinary Research Center for Finance
Adversarial Attacks and Defenses in Fault Detection and Diagnosis: A Comprehensive Benchmark on the Tennessee Eastman Process
AIRI；ISP RAS Research Center for Trusted Artificial Intelligence（ISP RAS可信人工智能研究中心）；Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院伊万尼科夫系统编程研究所）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (National Research University)（莫斯科物理技术学院（国家研究型大学））
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are often vulnerable to adversarial examples.Several proposed defenses deploy an ensemble of models with the hope that, although the individual models may be vulnerable, an adversary will not be able to find an adversarial example that succeeds against the ensemble. Depending on how the ensemble is used, an attacker may need to find a single adversarial example that succeeds against all, or a majority, of the models in the ensemble. The effectiveness of ensemble defenses against strong adversaries depends on the vulnerability spaces of models in the ensemble being d…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；State University of New York at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Skeleton-based action recognition has attracted increasing attention due to its strong adaptability to dynamic circumstances and potential for broad applications such as autonomous and anonymous surveillance. With the help of deep learning techniques, it has also witnessed substantial progress and currently achieved around 90\% accuracy in benign environment. On the other hand, research on the vulnerability of skeleton-based action recognition under different adversarial settings remains scant, which may raise security concerns about deploying such techniques into real-world systems. However, …
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Adversarial defense is a popular and important research area. Due to its intrinsic mechanism, one of the most straightforward and effective ways of defending attacks is to analyze the property of loss surface in the input space. In this paper, we define the local flatness of the loss surface as the maximum value of the chosen norm of the gradient regarding to the input within a neighborhood centered on the benign sample, and discuss the relationship between the local flatness and adversarial vulnerability. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel defense approach via regularizing the local fl…
We evaluate the robustness of Adversarial Logit Pairing, a recently proposed defense against adversarial examples. We find that a network trained with Adversarial Logit Pairing achieves 0.6% accuracy in the threat model in which the defense is considered. We provide a brief overview of the defense and the threat models/claims considered, as well as a discussion of the methodology and results of our attack, which may offer insights into the reasons underlying the vulnerability of ALP to adversarial attack.
Can Adversarial Code Comments Fool AI Security Reviewers -- Large-Scale Empirical Study of Comment-Based Attacks and Defenses Against LLM Code Analysis
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
The vulnerability of deep networks to adversarial attacks is a central problem for deep learning from the perspective of both cognition and security. The current most successful defense method is to train a classifier using adversarial images created during learning. Another defense approach involves transformation or purification of the original input to remove adversarial signals before the image is classified. We focus on defending naturally-trained classifiers using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling with an Energy-Based Model (EBM) for adversarial purification. In contrast to advers…
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Various forefront countermeasure methods for automatic speaker verification (ASV) with considerable performance in anti-spoofing are proposed in the ASVspoof 2019 challenge. However, previous work has shown that countermeasure models are vulnerable to adversarial examples indistinguishable from natural data. A good countermeasure model should not only be robust against spoofing audio, including synthetic, converted, and replayed audios; but counteract deliberately generated examples by malicious adversaries. In this work, we introduce a passive defense method, spatial smoothing, and a proactiv…
Adversarial examples reveal the vulnerability and unexplained nature of neural networks. Studying the defense of adversarial examples is of considerable practical importance. Most adversarial examples that misclassify networks are often undetectable by humans. In this paper, we propose a defense model to train the classifier into a human-perception classification model with shape preference. The proposed model comprising a texture transfer network (TTN) and an auxiliary defense generative adversarial networks (GAN) is called Human-perception Auxiliary Defense GAN (HAD-GAN). The TTN is used to …
With rapid progress and significant successes in a wide spectrum of applications, deep learning is being applied in many safety-critical environments. However, deep neural networks have been recently found vulnerable to well-designed input samples, called adversarial examples. Adversarial examples are imperceptible to human but can easily fool deep neural networks in the testing/deploying stage. The vulnerability to adversarial examples becomes one of the major risks for applying deep neural networks in safety-critical environments. Therefore, attacks and defenses on adversarial examples draw …
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Kaiserslautern（凯撒斯劳滕工业大学）
The adversarial vulnerability of deep networks has spurred the interest of researchers worldwide. Unsurprisingly, like images, adversarial examples also translate to time-series data as they are an inherent weakness of the model itself rather than the modality. Several attempts have been made to defend against these adversarial attacks, particularly for the visual modality. In this paper, we perform detailed benchmarking of well-proven adversarial defense methodologies on time-series data. We restrict ourselves to the $L_{\infty}$ threat model. We also explore the trade-off between smoothness …
University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）；Miami University（迈阿密大学）
Despite remarkable performance across a broad range of tasks, neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Many works focus on adversarial attacks and defenses on 2D images, but few focus on 3D point clouds. In this paper, our goal is to enhance the adversarial robustness of PointNet, which is one of the most widely used models for 3D point clouds. We apply the fast gradient sign attack method (FGSM) on 3D point clouds and find that FGSM can be used to generate not only adversarial images but also adversarial point clouds. To minimize the vulnerability of PointNet t…
DCI-Solutions；U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC), C5ISR Center（美国陆军作战能力发展司令部（CCDC）C5ISR中心）
There has been considerable and growing interest in applying machine learning for cyber defenses. One promising approach has been to apply natural language processing techniques to analyze logs data for suspicious behavior. A natural question arises to how robust these systems are to adversarial attacks. Defense against sophisticated attack is of particular concern for cyber defenses. In this paper, we develop a testing framework to evaluate adversarial robustness of machine learning cyber defenses, particularly those focused on log data. Our framework uses techniques from deep reinforcement l…
Zhejiang University of Science and Technology（浙江科技大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Guangzhou University（广州大学）；Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Ltd.（杭州海康威视数字技术股份有限公司）
With the boom of edge intelligence, its vulnerability to adversarial attacks becomes an urgent problem. The so-called adversarial example can fool a deep learning model on the edge node to misclassify. Due to the property of transferability, the adversary can easily make a black-box attack using a local substitute model. Nevertheless, the limitation of resource of edge nodes cannot afford a complicated defense mechanism as doing on the cloud data center. To overcome the challenge, we propose a dynamic defense mechanism, namely EI-MTD. It first obtains robust member models with small size throu…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Alibaba DAMO MIIL（阿里巴巴达摩院）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；HERE Technologies（HERE技术公司）；Wormpex AI Research（Wormpex人工智能研究院）
Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attack, where an imperceptible perturbation could result in misclassification. However, the vulnerability of DNN-based image ranking systems remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose two attacks against deep ranking systems, i.e., Candidate Attack and Query Attack, that can raise or lower the rank of chosen candidates by adversarial perturbations. Specifically, the expected ranking order is first represented as a set of inequalities, and then a triplet-like objective function is designed to obtain the optimal perturbat…
Deep neural networks can be easily fooled into making incorrect predictions through corruption of the input by adversarial perturbations: human-imperceptible artificial noise. So far adversarial training has been the most successful defense against such adversarial attacks. This work focuses on improving adversarial training to boost adversarial robustness. We first analyze, from an instance-wise perspective, how adversarial vulnerability evolves during adversarial training. We find that during training an overall reduction of adversarial loss is achieved by sacrificing a considerable proporti…
Machine learning models have demonstrated vulnerability to adversarial attacks, more specifically misclassification of adversarial examples. In this paper, we investigate an attack-agnostic defense against adversarial attacks on high-resolution images by detecting suspicious inputs. The intuition behind our approach is that the essential characteristics of a normal image are generally consistent with non-essential style transformations, e.g., slightly changing the facial expression of human portraits. In contrast, adversarial examples are generally sensitive to such transformations. In our app…
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ariel University（阿里尔大学工业工程与管理系）；Ariel Cyber Innovation Center, Ariel University（阿里尔大学阿里尔网络创新中心）
The growing incorporation of artificial neural networks (NNs) into many fields, and especially into life-critical systems, is restrained by their vulnerability to adversarial examples (AEs). Some existing defense methods can increase NNs' robustness, but they often require special architecture or training procedures and are irrelevant to already trained models. In this paper, we propose a simple defense that combines feature visualization with input modification, and can, therefore, be applicable to various pre-trained networks. By reviewing several interpretability methods, we gain new insigh…
Accidental Vulnerability: Factors in Fine-Tuning that Shift Model Safeguards
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；FAR AI（FAR人工智能公司）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；MILA（蒙特利尔人工智能研究院）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany（图宾根德国智能系统研究所）
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；ABB Corporate Research Center（ABB企业研究中心）；Wormpex AI Research（Wormpex人工智能研究院）
Deep Neural Network classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attack, where an imperceptible perturbation could result in misclassification. However, the vulnerability of DNN-based image ranking systems remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose two attacks against deep ranking systems, i.e., Candidate Attack and Query Attack, that can raise or lower the rank of chosen candidates by adversarial perturbations. Specifically, the expected ranking order is first represented as a set of inequalities, and then a triplet-like objective function is designed to obtain the optimal perturbation. C…
A unifying Bayesian framework for adversarial robustness
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela de Doctorado（马德里自治大学博士学院）；Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Spanish National Research Council（西班牙国家研究理事会数学研究所）；CUNEF Universidad（CUNEF大学）
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Deep neural networks represent the state of the art in machine learning in a growing number of fields, including vision, speech and natural language processing. However, recent work raises important questions about the robustness of such architectures, by showing that it is possible to induce classification errors through tiny, almost imperceptible, perturbations. Vulnerability to such "adversarial attacks", or "adversarial examples", has been conjectured to be due to the excessive linearity of deep networks. In this paper, we study this phenomenon in the setting of a linear classifier, and sh…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Despite achieving remarkable success in various domains, recent studies have uncovered the vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial perturbations, creating concerns on model generalizability and new threats such as prediction-evasive misclassification or stealthy reprogramming. Among different defense proposals, stochastic network defenses such as random neuron activation pruning or random perturbation to layer inputs are shown to be promising for attack mitigation. However, one critical drawback of current defenses is that the robustness enhancement is at the cost of noticeable pe…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Shuguang Hospital, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine（上海中医药大学附属曙光医院）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
As the COVID-19 pandemic puts pressure on healthcare systems worldwide, the computed tomography image based AI diagnostic system has become a sustainable solution for early diagnosis. However, the model-wise vulnerability under adversarial perturbation hinders its deployment in practical situation. The existing adversarial training strategies are difficult to generalized into medical imaging field challenged by complex medical texture features. To overcome this challenge, we propose a Contour Attention Preserving (CAP) method based on lung cavity edge extraction. The contour prior features are…
