NATTACK: A STRONG AND UNIVERSAL GAUSSIAN BLACK-BOX ADVERSARIAL ATTACK

Yandong Li, Lijun Li, Liqiang Wang, Tong Zhang, Boqing Gong

Abstract: Recent works find that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples, whose changes from the benign ones are imperceptible and yet lead DNNs to make wrong predictions. One can find various adversarial examples for the same input to a DNN using different attack methods. In other words, there is a population of adversarial examples, instead of only one, for any input to a DNN. By explicitly modeling this adversarial population with a Gaussian distribution, we propose a new black-box attack called NATTACK. The adversarial attack is hence formalized as an optimization problem, which searches the mean of the Gaussian under the guidance of increasing the target DNN's prediction error. NATTACK achieves 100% attack success rate on six out of eleven recently published defense methods (and greater than 90% for four), all using the same algorithm. Such results are on par with or better than powerful state-of-the-art white-box attacks. While the white-box attacks are often model-specific or defense-specific, the proposed black-box NATTACK is universally applicable to different defenses.

Keywords: adversarial attack, black-box, evolutional strategy, policy gradient

Data: [CIFAR-10](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-10), [ImageNet](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/imagenet)