Mitigating Evasion Attacks in Fog Computing Resource Provisioning Through Proactive Hardening

This paper investigates the susceptibility to model integrity attacks that overload virtual machines assigned by the $k$-means algorithm used for resource provisioning in fog networks. The considered k-means algorithm runs two phases iteratively: offline clustering to form clusters of requested workload and online classification of new incoming requests into offline-created clusters. First, we consider an evasion attack against the classifier in the online phase. A threat actor launches an exploratory attack using query-based reverse engineering to discover the Machine Learning (ML) model (the clustering scheme). Then, a passive causative (evasion) attack is triggered in the offline phase. To defend the model, we suggest a proactive method using adversarial training to introduce attack robustness into the classifier. Our results show that our mitigation technique effectively maintains the stability of the resource provisioning system against attacks.