ROOM: Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks Under Real-Time Constraints

Advances in deep learning have enabled a wide range of promising applications. However, these systems are vulnerable to Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) attacks; adversarially crafted perturbations to their inputs could cause them to misclassify. Several state-of-the-art adversarial attacks have demonstrated that they can reliably fool classifiers making these attacks a significant threat. Adversarial attack generation algorithms focus primarily on creating successful examples while controlling the noise magnitude and distribution to make detection more difficult. The underlying assumption of these attacks is that the adversarial noise is generated offline, making their execution time a secondary consideration. However, recently, just-in-time adversarial attacks where an attacker opportunistically generates adversarial examples on the fly have been shown to be possible. This paper introduces a new problem: how do we generate adversarial noise under real-time constraints to support such real-time adversarial attacks? Understanding this problem improves our understanding of the threat these attacks pose to real-time systems and provides security evaluation benchmarks for future defenses. Therefore, we first conduct a run-time analysis of adversarial generation algorithms. Universal attacks produce a general attack offline, with no online overhead, and can be applied to any input; however, their success rate is limited because of their generality. In contrast, online algorithms, which work on a specific input, are computationally expensive, making them inappropriate for operation under time constraints. Thus, we propose ROOM, a novel Real-time Online-Offline attack construction Model where an offline component serves to warm up the online algorithm, making it possible to generate highly successful attacks under time constraints.