Adversarial Attacks on Convolutional Neural Networks in Facial Recognition Domain

Numerous recent studies have demonstrated how Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers can be fooled by adversarial examples, in which an attacker adds perturbations to an original sample, causing the classifier to misclassify the sample. Adversarial attacks that render DNNs vulnerable in real life represent a serious threat in autonomous vehicles, malware filters, or biometric authentication systems. In this paper, we apply Fast Gradient Sign Method to introduce perturbations to a facial image dataset and then test the output on a different classifier that we trained ourselves, to analyze transferability of this method. Next, we craft a variety of different black-box attack algorithms on a facial image dataset assuming minimal adversarial knowledge, to further assess the robustness of DNNs in facial recognition. While experimenting with different image distortion techniques, we focus on modifying single optimal pixels by a large amount, or modifying all pixels by a smaller amount, or combining these two attack approaches. While our single-pixel attacks achieved about a 15% average decrease in classifier confidence level for the actual class, the all-pixel attacks were more successful and achieved up to an 84% average decrease in confidence, along with an 81.6% misclassification rate, in the case of the attack that we tested with the highest levels of perturbation. Even with these high levels of perturbation, the face images remained identifiable to a human. Understanding how these noised and perturbed images baffle the classification algorithms can yield valuable advances in the training of DNNs against defense-aware adversarial attacks, as well as adaptive noise reduction techniques. We hope our research may help to advance the study of adversarial attacks on DNNs and defensive mechanisms to counteract them, particularly in the facial recognition domain.