Must Learn AI Security Part 13: Generative Attacks Against AI

Chapter 13

Sep 15, 2023

This post is part of an ongoing series to educate about new and known security vulnerabilities against AI.

The full series index (including code, queries, and detections) is located here:

The book version (pdf) of this series is located here: https://github.com/rod-trent/OpenAISecurity/tree/main/Must_Learn/Book_Version

The book will be updated when each new part in this series is released.

What is a Generative attack against AI?

A generative attack against AI refers to a type of adversarial attack where the attacker generates new data or manipulates existing data to deceive, exploit, or manipulate the behavior of an artificial intelligence system. This can be done by creating inputs that are specifically designed to cause the AI system to produce incorrect, misleading, or unexpected outputs.

For example, an attacker might create adversarial examples, which are slightly modified versions of legitimate inputs, to trick a machine learning model into misclassifying them. These attacks are a potential concern for AI security, as they can be used to compromise the performance, reliability, and trustworthiness of AI systems. Researchers are actively working on developing robust AI models and defense mechanisms to counter such attacks.

How it works

A generative attack against AI works by exploiting the vulnerabilities or weaknesses of the AI system, particularly its underlying machine learning model. The attacker creates new data or manipulates existing data in a way that causes the AI system to behave incorrectly or produce undesirable outputs. Here's a general outline of how a generative attack might work:

Identify the target AI system: The attacker first identifies the AI system they want to attack, which could be a deep learning model, a recommendation system, or any other system that relies on machine learning algorithms.
Understand the model's architecture and training data: To generate adversarial examples or manipulated data, the attacker needs to have some understanding of the model's architecture, its training data, or both. This information can be obtained through reverse engineering, access to the model's parameters, or by observing the system's behavior.
Create adversarial examples or manipulated data: The attacker then creates new data or manipulates existing data in a way that is designed to deceive the AI system. This could involve adding small perturbations to input data, crafting entirely new inputs, or modifying the data's underlying features in subtle ways.
Test the attack: The attacker tests the adversarial examples or manipulated data against the AI system to see if it produces the desired effect, such as misclassification, incorrect recommendations, or other erroneous outputs.
Launch the attack: If the test is successful, the attacker deploys the adversarial examples or manipulated data against the target AI system, causing it to produce incorrect or unexpected results.

Defending against generative attacks is an ongoing area of research, as AI developers work on creating more robust models and incorporating defense mechanisms to minimize the impact of these attacks on AI systems.

Types of Generative attacks

There are several types of generative attacks against AI, each with its own unique approach and purpose. Some of the most common types include:

Adversarial examples: These are specially crafted inputs that are very similar to the original data but contain small, intentional perturbations that cause the AI system to produce incorrect or unexpected outputs. Adversarial examples can be used to attack image classification, natural language processing, and other AI systems.
Data poisoning: In this type of attack, the attacker manipulates the training data used to build the AI model, inserting malicious or misleading data points. This can lead to the trained model producing incorrect predictions, biased behavior, or other undesirable outcomes.
Model inversion: This type of attack aims to reveal sensitive information about the training data or recover the original data points used to train the AI model. By exploiting the model's behavior and outputs, the attacker can potentially infer private information about individual data points or users.
Trojan attacks: In a trojan attack, the attacker introduces a hidden trigger or backdoor into the AI model during the training process. When the AI system encounters specific inputs that activate the trigger, it produces incorrect or malicious outputs, while functioning normally for other inputs.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) based attacks: GANs are a class of AI models that can generate realistic synthetic data by training two neural networks in competition with each other. Attackers can use GANs to create fake data or adversarial examples that can deceive or manipulate the target AI system.

These are just a few examples of the many types of generative attacks against AI. Researchers are continually discovering new attack techniques and working on developing countermeasures to ensure the security and robustness of AI systems.

Why it matters

Generative attacks against AI can have several negative effects on AI systems, their users, and the organizations that rely on them. Some of these negative effects include:

Reduced performance and accuracy: Generative attacks can cause AI systems to produce incorrect outputs or make poor decisions, leading to a decrease in the system's overall performance and accuracy.
Compromised trustworthiness: If an AI system is found to be vulnerable to generative attacks, it may lead users and stakeholders to lose trust in the system's reliability and safety.
Security risks: Successful generative attacks can expose sensitive information or enable unauthorized access to protected resources, leading to potential security breaches and data leaks.
Financial and reputational damage: Organizations that rely on AI systems can suffer financial losses or reputational harm if their systems are compromised by generative attacks, especially if these attacks lead to incorrect decisions, biased behavior, or other negative outcomes.
Ethical concerns: Generative attacks can cause AI systems to produce biased or unfair outputs, which raises ethical concerns about the responsible use of AI in various domains, such as healthcare, finance, and criminal justice.
Legal implications: Depending on the nature of the attack and its consequences, generative attacks could lead to potential legal implications for the organizations using the AI systems, especially if these attacks result in harm, privacy violations, or non-compliance with regulations.

Why it might happen

An attacker may have various motivations for launching a generative attack against AI, and the gains can vary depending on their objectives. Some potential gains for an attacker include:

Disruption: The attacker may aim to disrupt the normal functioning of an AI system, causing reduced performance, incorrect outputs, or system failures. This could be done to undermine the credibility of the AI system or the organization using it.
Competitive advantage: By compromising the performance or reliability of a rival's AI system, an attacker could potentially gain a competitive advantage in the market or industry.
Financial gain: In some cases, generative attacks can be used for financial gain, such as manipulating stock prices, influencing product recommendations, or causing financial systems to make erroneous transactions.
Evasion or obfuscation: An attacker might use generative attacks to bypass AI-based security systems, such as facial recognition or intrusion detection systems, allowing them to evade detection or hide their activities.
Access to sensitive information: Some generative attacks, like model inversion, aim to extract sensitive information from AI systems, which can then be used for malicious purposes like identity theft, espionage, or data breaches.
Demonstrate capabilities: Attackers may also launch generative attacks to showcase their skills, expose vulnerabilities in AI systems, or challenge the security community to develop better defenses.
Political or ideological motives: In certain cases, attackers may have political or ideological motives to discredit, manipulate, or sabotage AI systems used by governments, organizations, or individuals they oppose.

It's essential for AI developers and researchers to understand these potential gains for attackers and work towards developing robust, secure AI systems that can withstand and counter such generative attacks.

Real-world Example

One real-world example of a generative attack against AI is the "adversarial stop sign" experiment conducted by researchers at the University of Washington, University of Michigan, Stony Brook University, and the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. The study, titled "Robust Physical-World Attacks on Deep Learning Models," demonstrated the vulnerability of image recognition systems to adversarial examples in a physical-world setting.

In this experiment, the researchers created adversarial examples of stop signs by applying stickers to the signs in specific patterns. The manipulated stop signs appeared normal to human observers but caused the AI-based object recognition systems to misclassify them as other objects, such as speed limit signs. The researchers used a deep learning model called Faster R-CNN, which was designed for object detection tasks.

This example highlights the vulnerability of AI systems to generative attacks, even in real-world, physical settings. The results of this study have significant implications for the security and reliability of AI-based systems, especially in critical areas like self-driving cars and other autonomous systems that rely on accurate object recognition for safe operation. Since this research, there has been increased focus on developing robust AI models and defense mechanisms to counter adversarial examples and other generative attacks.

How to Mitigate

Mitigating generative attacks against AI requires a combination of strategies and techniques to improve the robustness and security of AI systems. Some effective ways to counter these attacks include:

Adversarial training: This approach involves training the AI model with a combination of clean and adversarial examples. By exposing the model to adversarial examples during the training process, the model becomes more robust and resistant to similar attacks.
Defensive distillation: This technique involves training a distilled model that learns from the output probabilities of an original model, rather than the raw input data. The distilled model becomes more resistant to adversarial attacks by focusing on the most important features and smoothing the decision boundaries.
Data augmentation: Expanding the training dataset with additional examples, transformations, or noise can help the model generalize better and become more resistant to adversarial attacks.
Gradient masking or obfuscation: This method makes it difficult for an attacker to generate adversarial examples by hiding or modifying the gradient information used by the attacker. However, this approach may not provide complete protection, as attackers can develop alternative methods to create adversarial examples.
Regularization techniques: Applying regularization methods, such as L1 or L2 regularization, during the training process can help improve the model's robustness against adversarial attacks by preventing overfitting and encouraging smoother decision boundaries.
Detection and filtering: Developing methods to detect and filter out adversarial examples or manipulated data before it reaches the AI system can help prevent the negative effects of generative attacks.
Model ensemble and diversity: Combining multiple AI models with different architectures or training data can help increase the overall system's robustness, as an adversarial example effective against one model may not necessarily be effective against all models in the ensemble.
Security best practices: Following best practices for securing AI systems, such as proper access control, encryption, and monitoring, can help prevent unauthorized access to the model's architecture and training data, reducing the risk of generative attacks.

It is important to note that no single mitigation technique can provide complete protection against all types of generative attacks. A combination of these methods, along with ongoing research and development, is necessary to improve the security and robustness of AI systems in the face of generative attacks.

How to monitor/What to capture

Detecting generative attacks against AI requires monitoring various aspects of the AI system and its environment. Some key areas to monitor include:

Model performance metrics: Monitoring the accuracy, precision, recall, and other performance metrics of the AI system can help identify potential attacks if there's an unexplained drop or change in these metrics.
Input data: Regularly checking the input data for any unusual patterns or anomalies can help detect adversarial examples, data poisoning, or other malicious data manipulation.
Model outputs: Monitoring the AI system's outputs for unexpected or anomalous results can help identify potential attacks that cause the model to produce incorrect or biased predictions.
System logs: Analyzing system logs can reveal unauthorized access or manipulation attempts, which could be indicative of an ongoing attack.
Model training process: Keeping track of the model's training progress and performance, and comparing it with expected benchmarks, can help detect potential issues such as data poisoning or backdoor attacks.
Network traffic: Monitoring network traffic for unusual or unexpected communication patterns can help identify attempts to compromise the AI system or extract sensitive information.
User behavior: Monitoring user behavior and access patterns can help detect potential insider threats or unauthorized access to the AI system.
Model architecture and parameters: Regularly reviewing the AI model's architecture and parameters can help identify any unauthorized modifications or tampering.
External threat intelligence: Keeping up-to-date with the latest research, news, and threat reports related to generative attacks and AI security can provide valuable insights into potential attack vectors and help detect ongoing threats.

By closely monitoring these areas and employing effective detection mechanisms, organizations can improve their ability to detect and respond to generative attacks against AI systems. Additionally, it is crucial to have a well-defined incident response plan in place to handle any detected attacks and minimize their impact.

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