A Tutorial on Adversarial Learning Attacks and Countermeasures

Abstract: Machine learning algorithms are used to construct a mathematical model for a system based on training data. Such a model is capable of making highly accurate predictions without being explicitly programmed to do so. These techniques have a great many applications in all areas of the modern digital economy and artificial intelligence. More importantly, these methods are essential for a rapidly increasing number of safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles and intelligent defense systems. However, emerging adversarial learning attacks pose a serious security threat that greatly undermines further such systems. The latter are classified into four types, evasion (manipulating data to avoid detection), poisoning (injection malicious training samples to disrupt retraining), model stealing (extraction), and inference (leveraging over-generalization on training data). Understanding this type of attacks is a crucial first step for the development of effective countermeasures. The paper provides a detailed tutorial on the principles of adversarial machining learning, explains the different attack scenarios, and gives an in-depth insight into the state-of-art defense mechanisms against this rising threat .