Next up at #enigma2021, Sanghyun Hong will be speaking about "A SOUND MIND IN A VULNERABLE BODY: PRACTICAL HARDWARE ATTACKS ON DEEP LEARNING"

(Hint: speaker is on the

In recent years ML models have worked from research labs to production, which makes ML security important. Adversarial ML research studies how to mess with ML
For example by messing with the training data (c.f. Tay which became super-racist super-fast) or by foiling ML models by changing inputs in ways humans can't see.
Prior work considers ML models in a standalone, mathematical way
* looks at the robustness in an isolated manner
* doesn't look at the whole ecosystem and how the model is used -- ML models are running in real hardware with real software which has real vulns!
This talk focuses on hardware-level vulnerabilities. This is particularly interesting because these can break cryptographic guarantees (because those are outside of their threat models)
e.g. fault injection attacks, side-channel attacks
Recent work targets The Cloud
* co-location of VMs from different users
* weak attackers with less subtle control

The cloud providers try to secure things, e.g. protections against Rowhammer
But can you use the weak attacks left after mitigations deployed by cloud compute providers?
DNNs are resilient to numerical perturbations: this is used both to make things more efficient (e.g. pruning) but also in security it's really hard to make accuracy drop

... BUT this focuses on the average or best case, not the worst cast!
What happens when you can mess with the memory at one of these steps?
* negligible effect on the average case accuracy
* but flipping one bit can make significant amount of damage for particular queries

How much damage can a single bit flip cause?
Try it out!
tl;dr in general, one bit flip can really mess with your model! (Looked for the worst bit to flip)
Well, can you use this? There's a lot less control in real life

Some strong attackers might be able to hit an "achilles" bit (one that's really going to mess with the model), but weaker attackers are going to hit bits more randomly.
So they tried it out!
tl;dr running a pretty weak Rowhammer attack is enough to mess with a ML model being trained.
How about side-channel attacks?

The attacker might want to get their hands on fancy DNNs which are considered trade secrets and proprietary to their creators. They're expensive to make! They need good training data! People want to protect them!
Prior work required that the ML-model-trainer uses an off-the-shelf architecture. But people often don't for the fancy models. So what this work does [... if I'm following correctly] is to basically guess from a lot of architecture possibilities and then filter it down
Why is this possible? Because there are regularities in deep-learning calculation.

Does this work? Apparently so: they tried it out using a cache side-channel attack and got back the architectures of the fancy DNN back.
This needs more study
* we need to understand the worst-case ML fails under hardware attack
* don't discount the ability of an attacker with access to a weak hardware attack to cause a disproportionate amount of damage
You can find a writeup of this research at https://t.co/qUx8nAHW52

[end of talk]

More from Lea Kissner

More from Science

"NO LONGER BEST IN THE WORLD"
UNEP's new Human Development Index includes a new (separate) index: Planetary pressures-adjusted HDI (PHDI). News in Norway is that its position drops from #1 to #16 because of this, while Ireland rises from #2 to #1.
Why?

https://t.co/aVraIEzRfh


Check out Norway's 'Domestic Material Consumption'. Fossil fuels are no different here to Ireland's. What's different is this huge 'non-metallic minerals' category.
(Note also the jump in 1998, suggesting data problems.)
https://t.co/5QvzONbqmN


In Norway's case, it looks like the apparent consumption equation (production+imports-exports) for non-metal minerals is dominated by production: extraction of material in Norway.
https://t.co/5QvzONbqmN


And here we see that this production of non-metallic minerals is sand, gravel and crushed rock for construction. So it's about Norway's geology.
https://t.co/y6rqWmFVWc


Norway drops 15 places on the PHDI list not because of its CO₂ emissions (fairly high at 41st highest in the world per capita), but because of its geology, because it shifts a lot of rock whenever it builds anything.
An interesting thing about carp is that they can go into anoxic hibernation and switch to an anaerobic metabolism based on converting glycogen to ethanol.

The waste ethanol is diffused out the gills

https://t.co/V3D1umHf04

Carp can switch over to an anaerobic metabolism and quietly exhale booze until the situation gets better.

They basically evolved the same metabolic pathway as yeast, independently.

In theory, if you spent a few thousand years breeding carp for it, you could use them to make booze.

They'd be enormous, almost entirely glycogen deposits with a fish added as an afterthought.

The really interesting thing about anaerobic carp, is that they can go 4-5 months without oxygen by relying on liver glycogen.

You, a human, have only about 100 grams of glycogen in your liver, about 400 more grams in your skeletal muscles. Call it 500 grams total.

In humans, glycogen is also burned for energy. This is where the marathon runner's bonk comes from: you only have about 2,000 calories worth, and running a marathon burns those 2,000 calories.
Hard agree. And if this is useful, let me share something that often gets omitted (not by @kakape).

Variants always emerge, & are not good or bad, but expected. The challenge is figuring out which variants are bad, and that can't be done with sequence alone.


You can't just look at a sequence and say, "Aha! A mutation in spike. This must be more transmissible or can evade antibody neutralization." Sure, we can use computational models to try and predict the functional consequence of a given mutation, but models are often wrong.

The virus acquires mutations randomly every time it replicates. Many mutations don't change the virus at all. Others may change it in a way that have no consequences for human transmission or disease. But you can't tell just looking at sequence alone.

In order to determine the functional impact of a mutation, you need to actually do experiments. You can look at some effects in cell culture, but to address questions relating to transmission or disease, you have to use animal models.

The reason people were concerned initially about B.1.1.7 is because of epidemiological evidence showing that it rapidly became dominant in one area. More rapidly that could be explained unless it had some kind of advantage that allowed it to outcompete other circulating variants.

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