A Growing Threat to the Security of Systems That Rely on AI 😧

Mohamed Mubarak
3 min readAug 9, 2023

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Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence that trains computers to understand visual data from the real world. It does this by extracting meaningful information from images and videos, such as shapes, colors, and patterns. This information can then be used to perform a variety of tasks, such as object detection, facial recognition, and image classification.

Computer vision is made possible by advances in data structures and algorithms. These advances have allowed computers to process visual data more efficiently and accurately. In recent years, deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized the field of computer vision, enabling computers to perform visual recognition tasks with high accuracy.

Computer vision has a wide range of applications, including autonomous driving, computer vision authentication systems, and robotics. In autonomous driving, computer vision is used to identify objects on the road, such as cars, pedestrians, and traffic signs. This information is then used to control the car’s speed and direction.

Computer vision authentication systems use biometric data, such as iris scans, fingerprints, and facial features, to identify individuals. These systems are often used to unlock devices or provide access to restricted areas.

Robotics also relies heavily on computer vision. Robots use computer vision to navigate their environment, identify objects, and interact with humans.

While computer vision has many benefits, it also has some vulnerabilities. Adversarial machine learning attacks can be used to manipulate computer vision models into making incorrect predictions. This can be done by feeding the model carefully crafted images or videos that have been designed to exploit its weaknesses.

So what is Adversarial Machine Learning attacks??

Adversarial machine learning attacks are used to fool deep learning models into making incorrect predictions. This is done by adding carefully crafted noise to the input data, which is called an adversarial example. The noise is designed to be imperceptible to humans, but it can cause the model to make a mistake.

For example, let’s say you have a machine learning model that is trained to classify pandas from other animals. An attacker could create an adversarial example by adding a small amount of noise to a picture of a panda. The noise would be imperceptible to humans, but it would cause the model to classify the picture as a gibbon.

Ian J. Goodfellow, Jonathon Shlens & Christian Szegedy Google Inc., Mountain View, CA {goodfellow,shlens,szegedy}@google.com

Adversarial machine learning attacks can be used to compromise the security of systems that rely on machine learning models. For example, an attacker could use an adversarial example to fool a self-driving car into thinking that a stop sign is a speed limit sign. This could cause the car to crash.

Here is a more detailed explanation of how adversarial examples work:

  1. The attacker first needs to understand how the machine learning model works. This can be done by reverse engineering the model or by getting access to the model’s training data.
  2. Once the attacker understands how the model works, they can start to create adversarial examples. This is done by adding carefully crafted noise to the input data.
  3. The noise is designed to be imperceptible to humans, but it can cause the model to make a mistake.
  4. The attacker can then test the adversarial examples on the model to see if they are successful. If the adversarial examples are successful, the attacker can use them to compromise the security of the system.
Adversarial Machine Learning Mitigation: Adversarial Learning | by Ferhat Ozgur Catak | Towards Data Science

Adversarial machine learning attacks are a serious threat to the security of systems that rely on machine learning models. It is important to be aware of these attacks and to take steps to defend against them.

Researchers are working to develop techniques to defend against adversarial machine learning attacks. However, this is an active area of research, and there is no silver bullet solution.

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Mohamed Mubarak

Machine Learning and AI Enthusiast | Deep Learning | RNN | CNN | NLP | Data Engineering