Time Is All It Takes: Spike-Retiming Attacks on Event-Driven Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) compute with discrete spikes and exploit temporal structure, yet most adversarial attacks change intensities or event counts instead of timing. We study a timing-only adversary that retimes existing spikes while preserving spike counts and amplitudes in event-driven SNNs, thus remaining rate-preserving. We formalize a capacity-1 spike-retiming threat model with a unified trio of budgets: per-spike jitter B∞, total delay B1, and tamper count B0. Feasible adversarial examples must satisfy timeline consistency and non-overlap, which makes the search space discrete and constrained. To optimize such retimings at scale, we use projected-in-the-loop (PIL) optimization: shift-probability logits yield a differentiable soft retiming for backpropagation, and a strict projection in the forward pass produces a feasible discrete schedule that satisfies capacity-1, non-overlap, and the chosen budget at every step. The objective maximizes task loss on the projected input and adds a capacity regularizer together with budget-aware penalties, which stabilizes gradients and aligns optimization with evaluation. Across event-driven benchmarks (CIFAR10-DVS, DVS-Gesture, N-MNIST) and diverse SNN architectures, we evaluate under binary and integer event grids and a range of retiming budgets, and also test models trained with timing-aware adversarial training designed to counter timing-only attacks. For example, on DVS-Gesture the attack attains high success (over 90%) while touching fewer than 2% of spikes under B0. Taken together, our results show that spike retiming is a practical and stealthy attack surface that current defenses struggle to counter, providing a clear reference for temporal robustness in event-driven SNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/yuyi-sd/Spike-Retiming-Attacks.