SIN2: Stealth infection on neural network — A low-cost agile neural Trojan attack methodology

Deep Neural Network (DNN) has recently become the “de facto” technique to drive the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. However, there also emerges many security issues as the DNN based intelligent systems are being increasingly prevalent. Existing DNN security studies, such as adversarial attacks and poisoning attacks, are usually narrowly conducted at the software algorithm level, with the misclassification as their primary goal. The more realistic system-level attacks introduced by the emerging intelligent service supply chain, e.g. the third-party cloud based machine learning as a service (MLaaS) along with the portable DNN computing engine, have never been discussed. In this work, we propose a low-cost modular methodology-Stealth Infection on Neural Network, namely “SIN2”, to demonstrate the novel and practical intelligent supply chain triggered neural Trojan attacks. Our “SIN2” well leverages the attacking opportunities built upon the static neural network model and the underlying dynamic runtime system of neural computing framework through a bunch of neural Trojaning techniques. We implement a variety of neural Trojan attacks in Linux sandbox by following proposed “SIN2”. Experimental results show that our modular design can rapidly produce and trigger various Trojan attacks that can easily evade the existing defenses.