Superman Powered by Kryptonite: Turn the Adversarial Attack into Your Defense Weapon

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Presented at BlackHat USA 2020 by

Tongbo Luo

Xinyu Xing

Kailiang Ying

Jimmy Su

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is wielding a profound impact on global economic and social progress as well as ordinary citizens' daily life. However, with the advancement of AI technology, the next-generation hackers have successfully built a deep learning model that can more easily and efficiently destroy previously unbreakable security mechanisms (e.g., for the most complex CAPTCHAs, the recognition rate is 99%).Similar to the scene in 'Avengers 3' when 'Thanos' (Hackers) created the "Infinity Gauntlet" (AI-powered exploit toolkit) with six gems, and inevitably erases half the universe creature with a finger snap. In reality, as avengers (security defenders), we propose to leverage the weakness of the omnipotent 'Infinity Gauntlet' (AI) to flight evils (hackers). The irony is that the weapon, named 'Adversarial Machine Learning (ML)' used to explore the weakness of AI, was developed by attackers themselves.Adversarial ML exploits vulnerabilities in AI models and crafts inputs to machine learning models that an attacker has intentionally designed to cause the model to make mistakes (i.e., optical illusions for machines). The rationale behind our idea is that we deliberately add "adversarial perturbation" to our "target asset" that does not affect human use, but entirely misleads hacker's AI tools. In the example of "CAPTCHAs" service, we demonstrate how to use multiple levels of adversarial attack methods to fool hacker's AI tools and to detect hackers when they use AI toolkits. Another contribution we made in this paper is to "reprogram" hacker's AI toolkit and steal hacker's computing resources to perform tasks for us.