Scale-Adv: A Joint Attack on Image-Scaling and Machine Learning Classifiers
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As real-world images come in varying sizes, the machine learning model is part of a larger system that includes an upstream image scaling algorithm. In this system, the model and the scaling algorithm have become attractive targets for numerous attacks, such as adversarial examples and the recent image-scaling attack. In response to these attacks, researchers have developed defense approaches that are tailored to attacks at each processing stage. As these defenses are developed in isolation, their underlying assumptions become questionable when viewing them from the perspective of an end-to-end machine learning system. In this paper, we investigate whether defenses against scaling attacks and adversarial examples are still robust when an adversary targets the entire machine learning system. In particular, we propose Scale-Adv, a novel attack framework that jointly targets the image-scaling and classification stages. This framework packs several novel techniques, including novel representations of the scaling defenses. It also defines two integrations that allow for attacking the machine learning system pipeline in the white-box and black-box settings. Based on this framework, we evaluate cutting-edge defenses at each processing stage. For scaling attacks, we show that Scale-Adv can evade four out of five state-of-the-art defenses by incorporating adversarial examples. For classification, we show that Scale-Adv can significantly improve the performance of machine learning attacks by leveraging weaknesses in the scaling algorithm. We empirically observe that Scale-Adv can produce adversarial examples with less perturbation and higher confidence than vanilla black-box and white-box attacks. We further demonstrate the transferability of Scale-Adv on a commercial online API.
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