English

NeuroAttack: Undermining Spiking Neural Networks Security through Externally Triggered Bit-Flips

Cryptography and Security 2021-01-26 v1 Machine Learning Machine Learning

Abstract

Due to their proven efficiency, machine-learning systems are deployed in a wide range of complex real-life problems. More specifically, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) emerged as a promising solution to the accuracy, resource-utilization, and energy-efficiency challenges in machine-learning systems. While these systems are going mainstream, they have inherent security and reliability issues. In this paper, we propose NeuroAttack, a cross-layer attack that threatens the SNNs integrity by exploiting low-level reliability issues through a high-level attack. Particularly, we trigger a fault-injection based sneaky hardware backdoor through a carefully crafted adversarial input noise. Our results on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and SNNs show a serious integrity threat to state-of-the art machine-learning techniques.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.08041,
  title  = {NeuroAttack: Undermining Spiking Neural Networks Security through Externally Triggered Bit-Flips},
  author = {Valerio Venceslai and Alberto Marchisio and Ihsen Alouani and Maurizio Martina and Muhammad Shafique},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.08041},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication at the 2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:35:42.514Z