A Distributed Biased Boundary Attack Method in Black-Box Attack

The adversarial samples threaten the effectiveness of machine learning (ML) models and algorithms in many applications. In particular, black-box attack methods are quite close to actual scenarios. Research on black-box attack methods and the generation of adversarial samples is helpful to discover the defects of machine learning models. It can strengthen the robustness of machine learning algorithms models. Such methods require queries frequently, which are less efficient. This paper has made improvements in the initial generation and the search for the most effective adversarial examples. Besides, it is found that some indicators can be used to detect attacks, which is a new foundation compared with our previous studies. Firstly, the paper proposed an algorithm to generate initial adversarial samples with a smaller L2 norm; secondly, a combination between particle swarm optimization (PSO) and biased boundary adversarial attack (BBA) is proposed. It is the PSO-BBA. Experiments are conducted on the ImageNet. The PSO-BBA is compared with the baseline method. Experimental comparison results certificate that: (1) A distributed framework for adversarial attack methods is proposed; (2) The proposed initial point selection method can reduces query numbers effectively; (3) Compared to the original BBA, the proposed PSO-BBA algorithm accelerates the convergence speed and improves the accuracy of attack accuracy; (4) The improved PSO-BBA algorithm has preferable performance on targeted and non-targeted attacks; (5) The mean structural similarity (MSSIM) can be used as the indicators of adversarial attack.