Neural trojans

Y Liu, Y Xie, A Srivastava - 2017 IEEE International …, 2017 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
2017 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), 2017ieeexplore.ieee.org
While neural networks demonstrate stronger capabilities in pattern recognition nowadays,
they are also becoming larger and deeper. As a result, the effort needed to train a network
also increases dramatically. In many cases, it is more practical to use a neural network
intellectual property (IP) that an IP vendor has already trained. As we do not know about the
training process, there can be security threats in the neural IP: the IP vendor (attacker) may
embed hidden malicious functionality, ie neural Trojans, into the neural IP. We show that this …
While neural networks demonstrate stronger capabilities in pattern recognition nowadays, they are also becoming larger and deeper. As a result, the effort needed to train a network also increases dramatically. In many cases, it is more practical to use a neural network intellectual property (IP) that an IP vendor has already trained. As we do not know about the training process, there can be security threats in the neural IP: the IP vendor (attacker) may embed hidden malicious functionality, i.e neural Trojans, into the neural IP. We show that this is an effective attack and provide three mitigation techniques: input anomaly detection, re-training, and input preprocessing. All the techniques are proven effective. The input anomaly detection approach is able to detect 99.8% of Trojan triggers although with 12.2% false positive. The re-training approach is able to prevent 94.1% of Trojan triggers from triggering the Trojan although it requires that the neural IP be reconfigurable. In the input preprocessing approach, 90.2% of Trojan triggers are rendered ineffective and no assumption about the neural IP is needed.
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