Jonathan Peck

The widespread success of deep learning in solving machine learning problems has fueled its adoption in many fields, from speech recognition to drug discovery and medical imaging. However, deep learning systems are extremely fragile: imperceptibly small modifications to their input data can cause the models to produce erroneous output. It is very easy to generate such adversarial perturbations even for state-of-the-art models, yet immunization against them has proven exceptionally challenging. Despite over a decade of research on this problem, our solutions are still far from satisfactory and many open problems remain. In this work, we survey some of the most important contributions in the field of adversarial robustness. We pay particular attention to the reasons why past attempts at improving robustness have been insufficient, and we identify several promising areas for future research.

The input-output mappings learned by state-of-the-art neural networks are significantly discontinuous. It is possible to cause a neural network used for image recognition to misclassify its input by applying very specific, hardly perceptible perturbations to the input, called adversarial perturbations. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the existence of these peculiar samples as well as several methods to mitigate them. A proven explanation remains elusive, however. In this work, we take steps towards a formal characterization of adversarial perturbations by deriving lower bounds on the magnitudes of perturbations necessary to change the classification of neural networks. The bounds are experimentally verified on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 data sets.

Domain generation algorithms (DGAs) are commonly leveraged by malware to create lists of domain names which can be used for command and control (C&C) purposes. Approaches based on machine learning have recently been developed to automatically detect generated domain names in real-time. In this work, we present a novel DGA called CharBot which is capable of producing large numbers of unregistered domain names that are not detected by state-of-the-art classifiers for real-time detection of DGAs, including the recently published methods FANCI (a random forest based on human-engineered features) and LSTM.MI (a deep learning approach). CharBot is very simple, effective and requires no knowledge of the targeted DGA classifiers. We show that retraining the classifiers on CharBot samples is not a viable defense strategy. We believe these findings show that DGA classifiers are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks if they rely only on the domain name string to make a decision. Designing a robust DGA classifier may, therefore, necessitate the use of additional information besides the domain name alone. To the best of our knowledge, CharBot is the simplest and most efficient black-box adversarial attack against DGA classifiers proposed to date.