Query Attack by Multi-Identity Surrogates

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are acknowledged as vulnerable to adversarial attacks while the existing black-box attacks require extensive queries on the victim DNN to achieve high success rates. For query-efficiency, surrogate models of the victim are used to generate transferable adversarial examples (AEs) because of their
gradient similarity
(GS), i.e., surrogates' attack gradients are similar to the victim's ones. However, it is generally neglected to exploit their similarity on outputs, namely the
prediction similarity
(PS), to filter out inefficient queries by surrogates without querying the victim. To jointly utilize and also optimize surrogates' GS and PS, we develop QueryNet, a unified attack framework that can significantly reduce queries. QueryNet creatively attacks by multi-identity surrogates, i.e., crafts several AEs for one sample by different surrogates and also uses surrogates to decide on the most promising AE for the query. After that, the victim's query feedback is accumulated to optimize not only surrogates' parameters but also their architectures, enhancing both the GS and the PS. Although QueryNet has no access to pretrained surrogates' prior, it reduces queries by averagely about an order of magnitude compared to alternatives within an acceptable time, according to our comprehensive experiments: 11 victims (including two commercial models) on MNIST/CIFAR10/ImageNet, allowing only 8-b image queries, and no access to the victim's training data. The code is available at
https://github.com/Sizhe-Chen/QueryNet
.