Timing Attack on Random Forests for Generating Adversarial Examples

Abstract

The threat of implementation attacks to machine learning has become an issue recently. These attacks include side-channel attacks that use information acquired from implemented devices and fault attacks that inject faults into implemented devices using external tools such as lasers. Thus far, these attacks have targeted mainly deep neural networks; however, other popular methods such as random forests can also be targets. In this paper, we investigate the threat of implementation attacks to random forests. Specifically, we propose a novel timing attack that generates adversarial examples, and experimentally evaluate its attack success rate. The proposed attack exploits a fundamental property of random forests: the response time from the input to the output depends on the number of conditional branches invoked during prediction. More precisely, we generate adversarial examples by optimizing the response time. This optimization affects predictions because changes in the response time imply changes in the results of the conditional branches. For the optimization, we use an evolution strategy that tolerates measurement error in the response time. Experiments are conducted in a black-box setting where attackers can use only prediction labels and response times. Experimental results show that the proposed attack generates adversarial examples with higher probability than a state-of-the-art attack that uses only predicted labels. This suggests the attacker motivation for implementation attacks on random forests.