Fault injection attack on deep neural network

Deep neural network (DNN), being able to effectively learn from a training set and provide highly accurate classification results, has become the de-facto technique used in many mission-critical systems. The security of DNN itself is therefore of great concern. In this paper, we investigate the impact of fault injection attacks on DNN, wherein attackers try to misclassify a specified input pattern into an adversarial class by modifying the parameters used in DNN via fault injection. We propose two kinds of fault injection attacks to achieve this objective. Without considering stealthiness of the attack, single bias attack (SBA) only requires to modify one parameter in DNN for misclassification, based on the observation that the outputs of DNN may linearly depend on some parameters. Gradient descent attack (GDA) takes stealthiness into consideration. By controlling the amount of modification to DNN parameters, GDA is able to minimize the fault injection impact on input patterns other than the specified one. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed attacks.