Blackbox Attacks via Surrogate Ensemble Search
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Blackbox adversarial attacks can be categorized into transfer- and query-based attacks. Transfer methods do not require any feedback from the victim model, but provide lower success rates compared to query-based methods. Query attacks often require a large number of queries for success. To achieve the best of both approaches, recent efforts have tried to combine them, but still require hundreds of queries to achieve high success rates (especially for targeted attacks). In this paper, we propose a novel method for blackbox attacks via surrogate ensemble search (BASES) that can generate highly successful blackbox attacks using an extremely small number of queries. We first define a perturbation machine that generates a perturbed image by minimizing a weighted loss function over a fixed set of surrogate models. To generate an attack for a given victim model, we search over the weights in the loss function using queries generated by the perturbation machine. Since the dimension of the search space is small (same as the number of surrogate models), the search requires a small number of queries. We demonstrate that our proposed method achieves better success rate with at least 30x fewer queries compared to state-of-the-art methods on different image classifiers trained with ImageNet (including VGG-19, DenseNet-121, and ResNext-50). In particular, our method requires as few as 3 queries per image (on average) to achieve more than a 90 a 99 Google Cloud Vision API and achieved a 91 with 2.9 queries per image. We also show that the perturbations generated by our proposed method are highly transferable and can be adopted for hard-label blackbox attacks.
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