🛡️ Adversarial Attacks

Understand vulnerabilities in neural networks and how to defend against them

Your Progress

0 / 5 completed
Previous Module
Bias in AI Systems

Introduction to Adversarial Attacks

🎯 What are Adversarial Examples?

Adversarial examples are carefully crafted inputs designed to fool neural networks into making incorrect predictions. These inputs are created by adding imperceptible perturbations that are invisible to humans but cause the model to misclassify.

⚠️
Security Threat

Adversarial attacks can compromise autonomous vehicles, facial recognition, malware detection, and more.

🖼️ Classic Example

🐼

Original Image

Panda
57.7% confidence
+
Tiny noise
ε = 0.007
(Imperceptible)
🦧

Adversarial

Gibbon
99.3% confidence

Goodfellow et al., 2014 - Adding imperceptible noise completely fools the classifier

🔬 Key Properties

👁️

Imperceptible

Perturbations are so small that humans cannot distinguish adversarial from original images

🎯

Targeted

Can force model to predict any specific target class chosen by attacker

🔄

Transferable

Examples crafted for one model often fool other models too, even different architectures

Universal

Single perturbation can be applied to any image to cause misclassification

🎭 Attack Scenarios

🚗

Autonomous Vehicles

Adversarial stickers on stop signs cause misclassification

Result: Vehicle doesn't stop at intersection
👤

Facial Recognition

Adversarial glasses fool authentication systems

Result: Unauthorized access or evasion
🦠

Malware Detection

Adversarial code evades ML-based antivirus

Result: Malware goes undetected
📧

Spam Filters

Carefully crafted emails bypass spam detection

Result: Phishing emails reach inbox

🔍 Why Models Are Vulnerable

High-Dimensional Input Space

Tiny perturbations in each dimension accumulate to significant changes in high dimensions

Linear Behavior

Despite non-linear activations, models exhibit linear behavior in many regions

Overfitting to Data Manifold

Models learn decision boundaries too close to training data, vulnerable off-manifold