English

A Semi Black-Box Adversarial Bit-Flip Attack with Limited DNN Model Information

Cryptography and Security 2024-12-13 v1

Abstract

Despite the rising prevalence of deep neural networks (DNNs) in cyber-physical systems, their vulnerability to adversarial bit-flip attacks (BFAs) is a noteworthy concern. This paper proposes B3FA, a semi-black-box BFA-based parameter attack on DNNs, assuming the adversary has limited knowledge about the model. We consider practical scenarios often feature a more restricted threat model for real-world systems, contrasting with the typical BFA models that presuppose the adversary's full access to a network's inputs and parameters. The introduced bit-flip approach utilizes a magnitude-based ranking method and a statistical re-construction technique to identify the vulnerable bits. We demonstrate the effectiveness of B3FA on several DNN models in a semi-black-box setting. For example, B3FA could drop the accuracy of a MobileNetV2 from 69.84% to 9% with only 20 bit-flips in a real-world setting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.09450,
  title  = {A Semi Black-Box Adversarial Bit-Flip Attack with Limited DNN Model Information},
  author = {Behnam Ghavami and Mani Sadati and Mohammad Shahidzadeh and Lesley Shannon and Steve Wilton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.09450},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:32:45.238Z