Generating Targeted Adversarial Attacks and Assessing their Effectiveness in Fooling Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural network (DNN) models have gained popularity for most image classification problems. However, DNNs also have numerous vulnerable areas. These vulnerabilities can be exploited by an adversary to execute a successful adversarial attack, which is an algorithm to generate perturbed inputs that can fool a well-trained DNN. Among various existing adversarial attacks, DeepFool, a white-box untargeted attack is considered as one of the most reliable algorithms to compute adversarial perturbations. However, in some scenarios such as person recognition, adversary might want to carry out a targeted attack such that the input gets misclassified in a specific target class. Moreover, studies show that defense against a targeted attack is tougher than an untargeted one. Hence, generating a targeted adversarial example is desirable from an attacker’s perspective. In this paper, we propose ‘Targeted DeepFool’, which is based on computing a minimal amount of perturbation required to reach the target hyperplane. The proposed algorithm produces minimal amount of distortion for conventional image datasets: MNIST and CIFAR10. Further, Targeted DeepFool shows excellent performance in terms of adversarial success rate.