Poisoning Attacks on Deep Learning based Wireless Traffic Prediction

Tianhang Zheng, Baochun Li

Abstract: Big client data and deep learning bring a new level of accuracy to wireless traffic prediction in non-adversarial environments. However, in a malicious client environment, the training-stage vulnerability of deep learning (DL) based wireless traffic prediction remains under-explored. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic study on training-stage poisoning attacks against DL-based wireless traffic prediction in both centralized and distributed training scenarios. In contrast to previous poisoning attacks on computer vision, we consider a more practical threat model, specific to wireless traffic prediction, to design these poisoning attacks. In particular, we assume that potential malicious clients do not collude or have any additional knowledge about the other clients’ data. We propose a perturbation masking strategy and a tuning-and-scaling method to fit data and model poisoning attacks into the practical threat model. We also explore potential defenses against these poisoning attacks and propose two defense methods. Through extensive evaluations, we show the mean square error (MSE) can be increased by over 50% to 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">8</sup> times with our proposed poisoning attacks. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our data sanitization approach and anomaly detection method against our poisoning attacks in centralized and distributed scenarios.