arXiv:2507.07259cs.LGcs.AI2025-07被引 1

攻击者利用分布式模型间的中间特征,可实现高迁移性对抗攻击。

Exploiting Edge Features for Transferable Adversarial Attacks in Distributed Machine Learning

  • 通过分析传输的中间特征重建张量结构,构建可迁移的代理模型。
  • 在黑盒条件下,攻击成功率提升显著,跨模型攻击效果增强。
  • 适用于边缘计算中模型分片场景,提醒开发者关注特征泄露风险。

随着机器学习模型在物联网边缘环境中的广泛应用,模型在多个计算节点间分割的分布式深度学习范式引入了新的安全风险。与传统推理设置不同,这些分布式流程跨越异构节点和通信层,扩大了潜在攻击面。本文揭示了一种此前被忽视的漏洞:即使攻击者无法访问边缘和云端的模型(即黑盒),只要能截获它们之间的中间特征,仍可构成严重威胁。我们证明,在这种温和且现实的假设下,攻击者可构建高度可迁移的代理模型,使整个深度学习系统更容易受到逃避攻击。具体而言,截获的特征可被有效分析并用于蒸馏出能生成高迁移性对抗样本的替代模型。为此,我们提出一种专为分布式场景设计的攻击策略:通过简单的统计分析从向量化传输特征中重构原始张量形状,并相应调整代理模型架构以实现有效特征蒸馏。全面系统的实验评估表明,采用该策略训练的代理模型显著提升了对抗攻击的迁移能力。这些发现强调了在设计安全的分布式深度学习系统时,必须考虑中间特征泄露问题。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

As machine learning models become increasingly deployed across the edge of internet of things environments, a partitioned deep learning paradigm in which models are split across multiple computational nodes introduces a new dimension of security risk. Unlike traditional inference setups, these distributed pipelines span the model computation across heterogeneous nodes and communication layers, thereby exposing a broader attack surface to potential adversaries. Building on these motivations, this work explores a previously overlooked vulnerability: even when both the edge and cloud components of the model are inaccessible (i.e., black-box), an adversary who intercepts the intermediate features transmitted between them can still pose a serious threat. We demonstrate that, under these mild and realistic assumptions, an attacker can craft highly transferable proxy models, making the entire deep learning system significantly more vulnerable to evasion attacks. In particular, the intercepted features can be effectively analyzed and leveraged to distill surrogate models capable of crafting highly transferable adversarial examples against the target model. To this end, we propose an exploitation strategy specifically designed for distributed settings, which involves reconstructing the original tensor shape from vectorized transmitted features using simple statistical analysis, and adapting surrogate architectures accordingly to enable effective feature distillation. A comprehensive and systematic experimental evaluation has been conducted to demonstrate that surrogate models trained with the proposed strategy, i.e., leveraging intermediate features, tremendously improve the transferability of adversarial attacks. These findings underscore the urgent need to account for intermediate feature leakage in the design of secure distributed deep learning systems.

对抗攻击分布式学习边缘计算

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