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  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>The Italian Conference on CyberSecurity, April</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>On Attacks (Dis)Similarities to Test Adversarial Defense: Can We Reduce the Attack Set?⋆</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Tommaso Puccetti</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Tommaso Zoppi</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Andrea Ceccarelli</string-name>
          <email>andrea.ceccarelli@unifi.it</email>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Department of Engineering and Information Science, University of Trento</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Via Sommarive 9, 38124, Trento</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Department of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Florence</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Viale Morgagni 67/a, 50134 Firenze (FI)</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2024</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>0</volume>
      <fpage>8</fpage>
      <lpage>12</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>Evaluating defensive solutions against adversarial evasion attacks means quantifying the defense's capability to detect or tolerate attacks. Ideally, a defense should be tested against all the possible attacks: however, this is not achievable, and it is necessary to identify a representative attack set for the evaluation. Unfortunately, how to select such an attack set is an open question. Arguably, the selected attacks should apply diverse effects on the original image, in terms of dimension and distribution of the perturbation. We propose to quantify the perturbation through Image Quality metrics in addition to L-norms, such that adversarial attacks can be grouped (and only one representative of the group can be selected to test the defense) if they i) similarly perturb the attacked image, and ii) have similar success rate and detectability rate. Disappointingly, the analysis reveals that attacks with similar image perturbation cannot be related. Substantial evidence discourages grouping attacks and suggests that any reduction of the attack set impacts the validity of the defense evaluation. Evasion attacks, adversarial attacks, attack categories, image quality metrics, distance metrics. 1 0000-0002-0297-2108 (T. Puccetti); 0000-0001-9820-6047 (T. Zoppi); 0000-0002-2291-2428 (A. Ceccarelli)</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>
        Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that perform image classification are vulnerable to
adversarial samples, which are deliberately crafted by perturbing legitimate input (e.g., images,
texts, tabular data) to mislead the target model [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref7">1, 7</xref>
        ]. In this paper, we focus on evasion attacks
only, aimed at producing altered samples to fail the classification outcome of a trained classifier.
The two main approaches to defending against adversarial samples are i) increase the
robustness of the image classifier [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ], or ii) detect adversarial samples before they are fed to the
target classifier [36, 23, 24]. In both cases, a proper evaluation of the defense requires
quantifying its ability to protect against adversarial attacks.
      </p>
      <p>
        Ideally, the attack set used for the evaluation should include all the possible attacks against
the target classifier, and the defense should be evaluated against each of these attacks. This is
unfeasible because of both computational effort and the potential occurrence of unknown
attacks. On top of this, without a rigorous methodology for the evaluation, many of the attacks
and defenses in the literature have been evaluated with custom approaches that are difficult to
compare [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref2 ref3 ref4 ref5">1, 2, 3, 4, 5</xref>
        ], such that in some cases it may lead to lack of clarity in the efficacy of
newly proposed solutions.
      </p>
      <p>
        The overarching challenge in evaluating defenses lies in the choice of the attack set to be
considered: the attack set should deliver a realistic representation of the attack space that allows
defining precise boundaries of the defense and, consequently, details the defense’s coverage
against different attacks. The state of the art agrees that i) there is no individual attack that
sufficiently covers the entire attack space, and ii) there is no evidence that a defense able to
tolerate certain attacks (i.e., a defined portion of the attack space) will also be able to tolerate
others [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. Unavoidably, the typical approach to select a representative attack set is to include
multiple attacks, selected based on i) attack configuration parameters, ii) success rate, and iii)
values of the L0, L1, L2, and L ∞ norms (simply termed L-norms in the rest of the paper) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5, 36,
23</xref>
        ]. Unfortunately, this approach is still exposed to known pitfalls. Sharing the attack
generation parameters guarantees the reproducibility of the experiments but provides limited
information about the perturbation. Instead, L-norms quantify the difference between the
original image and the attacked counterpart: they are considered a viable proxy to measure the
perturbation crafted by the attack and to craft attacks that are not perceived by the human eye.
However, the L-norms alone may not suffice in quantifying the diversity of attacks, i.e., a
defense may detect attacks of type A and fail to detect attacks of type B, even if both attacks
have similar L-norms values. Moreover, the success and detection rates are usually linked with
the L-norms, but this relation is weak and varies from attack to attack.
      </p>
      <p>To summarize, different attacks may have similar effects on the target classifier, and similar
values of L-norms, but the defense may decide differently. The same applies to attacks that
produce different image perturbations. Additionally, grouping attacks based on their
mathematical formulation is not effective: small differences in the formulation may have a
relevant impact on the perturbation applied to images and on the success rate.</p>
      <p>Position statement and approach. We believe that the number of attacks to be used when
testing a defense can be reduced only by finding similarities in the perturbation introduced in
the adversarial images, together with evidence that such similarities will have similar effects on
the classifier and the defense. This paper investigates whether quantifying the perturbation
through distance metrics in addition to L-norms allows partitioning adversarial attacks into
classes, which could then be used to craft r epresentative attack sets. In other words, we
investigate whether measuring perturbations using distance metrics allows for the
identification of characteristics of the attacks that permit to discriminate between attack
families.</p>
      <p>
        We identify alternative distance metrics to extrapolate different information from the
adversarial image. In particular, the Image Quality Assessment (IQA) domain particularly fits
our necessities: IQA aims at quantitatively evaluating the quality of images modified by a
variety of distortions (e.g., processing, compression, etc.) to exploit the Human Visual System
(HVS) model for low-level perception [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8 ref9">8, 9</xref>
        ]. Unlike the L-norms, image quality metrics account
for the position of the pixels inside the image rather than operating on a single-dimension
vector. We combine L-norms and image quality metrics to quantify perturbations, a novel
approach in this context. We group attacks, where attacks belong to the same group if they
have similar values of distance metrics. More precisely, we collocate attacks in the same group
if we can show that attacks generate similar perturbations of the target image (measured with
the distance metrics), and consequently have a similar success rate against the target classifier
and are detected or mitigated with a similar efficacy by one or more defenses.
      </p>
      <p>
        We identify groups through an experimental evaluation. First, we generate 222 attack sets
from 12 different attacks targeting two state-of-the-art models, namely ConvNet12 [33] and
ResNet50 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">52</xref>
        ]. Then, we apply each of the attacks to the first 100 images of the CIFAR-10 [25]
dataset, generating, for each model, a total of 22 200 adversarial images. For each adversarial
image, we compute the selected distance metrics. Then, we perform three separate analyses on
the images of both models: i) clustering analysis to group the 12attacks into the same cluster(s)
if they have similar distance metric values; ii) regression analysis to predict the success rate of
an attack using distance metrics as input features; iii) binary classification analysis to predict
the detection of an attack using as input features the distance metrics, using 2 detectors from
the state of the art.
      </p>
      <p>The results indicate that employing distance metrics to quantify perturbations exhibits some
discriminatory capabilities, as it effectively clusters a small number of the selected attacks with
highly similar mathematical formulations. However, these results, while insightful, do not
demonstrate a high level of generalizability. Some attacks with shared mathematical
formulations are correctly grouped, while others with similar formulations are not consistently
recognized as a distinct group. Our experiments reveal that numerous attacks remain
ungrouped, lacking observable signatures or defining characteristics in their perturbations.
Consequently, we argue that reducing the number of attacks for testing a defense compromises
the validity of the results.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. Background</title>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>2.1. Adversarial Evasion Attacks Exercised in Our Study</title>
        <p>Adversarial attacks consist of deliberately manipulating the input to a DNN to cause wrong
predictions [27]. In this paper, we focus on evasion attacks against image classifiers, because i)
they have large applications in the real world [30], and ii) image classification is the typical
application domain for such attacks [28, 29]. Evasion attacks can be broadly classified based on
the knowledge of the attacker about the target classifier: white box attacks imply some
knowledge of the classifier architecture, while black box attacks approximate such information.
Evasion attacks can be grouped into finer categories, based on the specific implementation
details needed to run the attack: i) gradient-based, ii) score-based, and iii) decision-based.
Gradient-based attack methods exploit the gradient of the loss of the target classifier during the
input processing. The score-based attacks solely on the output score of the target classifier.
Decision-based attacks are the most indicated for a black box setting as they need only
prediction labels [31]. We select white box and black box attacks from the three categories, to
create a heterogeneous set of 12 attacks.</p>
        <p>Gradient-Based Attacks. One of the most effective gradient-based attacks is Carlini and
Wagner (CW2, [37]). It is formulated as the following optimization problem:
 ′ =   {|| −  0||2 +   ( )} (1)</p>
        <p>The first term enforces perturbation on the original image, the second term is the loss
function of the model, and g(x) is g(x)= { ( ) 0 −   ≠ 0 ( ) , 0} where  0 is the
 ( ) is the score returned predicting x with label i.
ground truth label of the input  0, is the score computed on the input x for the  0 label, and</p>
        <p>Instead, Elastic Net (ELA, [38, 39]) formulates the generation of adversarial attacks as an
elastic-net regularized optimization problem:
 ′ = 

| −  0| 2
2
+  | −  0| 1 +   ( )
(2)
where g(x) is the same as the CW2 attack.</p>
        <p>Projected Gradient Descent (PGD, [41]) solves the optimization problem using the projected
gradient descent. Practically, it finds adversarial images by adding or subtracting a small error
to each dimension of the input based on the gradient sign. Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGM,
[40]) can be viewed as a one -step PGD attack, while the Basic Iterative Method (BIM, [42]) is
the iterative form of the attack. Deep Fool (DEEP, [43]), performs an iterative linearization of
the classifier to calculate the closest decision boundary for a genuine image x. Jacobian-based
Saliency Map (JSMA, [44]), generates an adversarial saliency map, which helps identify the
input features to be included in the perturbation. Newton Fool Attack (NEW, [45]) operates by
executing a gradient descent, which reduces the likelihood of the initial class.</p>
        <p>Score-Based Attacks. We select the Zeroth Order Optimization-Based Attack (ZOO, [46]). The
attack is a black box, and it uses a finite difference method to estimate the gradient sign of the
loss function w.r.t the input image. The gradient estimation is used to run the CW2 attack and
craft the final adversarial image.</p>
        <p>
          Decision-Based Attack. We select from this category the Boundary Attack (BOUND, [47])
based on the random walk on the decision boundary of the input image. The method starts with
a sample categorized in the target class and searches for a minimum amount of perturbation to
keep the image adversarial. Also, we select the HopSkipJump Attack (HOP, [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">48</xref>
          ]), which can be
formulated as solving a zeroth order optimization problem [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">49</xref>
          ].
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>2.2. Distance Metrics Selected in Our Study</title>
        <p>Modifying the template — including but not limited to adjusting margins, typeface sizes,
line spacing, paragraph and list definitions — is not allowed. At the state of the art, the
amount of perturbation introduced by an attacker is quantified using the pixel Lp norms, for
any
p&gt;0: |v|p =</p>
        <p>
          ∑ =1 |  | 
1
(3)
where v = ||x–x'|| is the perturbation introduced in an image x to obtain its adversarial
counterpart x', and vi=||xi–xi'|| is the difference pixel by pixel of the two images. Each L-norm
has a different mathematical meaning and, therefore, captures different characteristics of the
perturbation [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">50</xref>
          ]. L0 distance measures the number of coordinates i such that xi ≠ xi'. The L0
distance is equal to the number of pixels that have been altered in an image. L1 distance, also
known as Manhattan Distance, is the sum of the absolute difference between pixels of two
images. L2 distance, also known as Euclidean distance, is the squared root of the sum of the
squared absolute difference between pixels of two images. The L2 distance can remain small
when there are many small changes to many pixels. L∞ distance is the largest absolute difference
between pixels of two images. It measures the maximum change to any of the coordinates: ||x –
x'||∞ = max(|xi–xi'|, …, |xn–xn'|). For images, we can think there is a maximum budget, and each
pixel is allowed to be changed up to this limit, with no limit on the number of pixels that are
modified.
        </p>
        <p>We also use distance metrics from the image quality domain. L-norms work very well to
quantify the wideness and intensity of the perturbation but may not be sufficient to capture the
finer characteristics of the perturbation. We select the following metrics.</p>
        <p>Mean Squared Error (MSE) calculates the cumulative squared error between the original
image and the distorted image:</p>
        <p>MSE = 
1
 −1
 −1
 =0 [ ( ,  )]2</p>
        <p>
          (4)
 =0
where x and y provide the pixel position, M and N are the image width and height, and E(x,
y) = Io(x, y) – Ip(x, y) is the difference pixel by pixel of the original image Io and the perturbed
image Ip [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ]. Although it does not correlate well with the perceived image quality [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12 ref13">12, 13</xref>
          ], we
select the MSE because it is used as the basis for many of the HVS-based metrics.
        </p>
        <p>
          Block Sensitive - Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR-B, [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
          ]) can be seen as an advanced version
of the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ]) that includes a blocking effect factor (BEF)
specifically used for measuring the quality of images that present blocking artifacts. As reported
in [14], BEF is calculated by considering horizontal and vertical neighboring pixel pairs that do
not lie across block boundaries. The blocking effect factor specifically measures the amount of
blocking artifacts of the image. The mean square error including the blocking effects MSE-B for
a reference image x and test image y is defined as MSE-B(x, y)=MSE(x, y)+BEFTot(y), where
BEFTot(y) is the BEF computed over all block sizes. At last, PSNR -B is obtained as PNSR-B(x,
y)=10 log10 (2552 /MSE-B(x, y)).
        </p>
        <p>Universal Quality Image Index (UQI, [15]) calculates the amount of transformation of relevant
data from the reference image into the perturbed image. UQI is defined as:</p>
        <p>UQI= ( 2 +  42   ′  ̅ ̅′ (5)</p>
        <p>
          ′ )[( ̅)2 + ( ̅′)2 ]
where  ̅ and  ̅ ′ are respectively the mean values of the original and perturbed images,   2 and
  2′ are the variances and    ′ is the covariance. The range of this metric is -1 to 1, where 1
indicates that the reference and perturbed images are similar [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ].
        </p>
        <p>Erreur Relative Globale Adimensionnelle Synthèse (ERGAS, [16]) measures the global
radiometric distortion between two images; it calculates the average error of each band of the
perturbed image for the reference one. As reported in [17], high values of ERGAS indicate low
quality of the perturbed image, while lower values indicate good quality. The ERGAS is given
as:</p>
        <p>ERGAS = 100 
ℎ 1    (  )2
 ∑ =1(   ( )2 )
(6)
where h and w are the height and width of the image, the RMSE(Bk) is the Root Mean Squared
Error for k-band computed between the original and altered image, and mean(k)2 denotes the
mean k-band of the original image. Relative Average Spectral Error (RASE, [21]) determines the
difference in spectral information between each band of the merged image and the original
image. Given M the mean radiance of the N spectral bands Bi of the original image, and the root
mean square error RMSE, RASE is computed as:

SAM =</p>
        <p>〈 ,  ′〉
|| ||2∙|| ′||2
SCC =
∑ ∑(  −   )</p>
        <p>2 x' −  x'
∑(  −   )2 ∑ x' −  x'
2
2</p>
        <p>Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM, [22]) computes the spectral angle between the pixel vector of
the reference image and of the perturbed image. It is performed on a pixel-by-pixel basis. A
value of SAM equal to zero denotes the absence of spectral distortion. In the following
expression, x is the original image, and x' is the perturbed image:</p>
        <p>Spatial Correlation Coefficient (SCC, [19]) represents the correlation between two visual
signals of images in a cortical visual space. The SCC is expressed as:
(7)
(8)
(9)
  ′ is the mean of the modified image. The value of SCC ranges from -1 to 1 [20].
where x' is the modified image, x is the original image,   is the mean of the original image, and</p>
        <p>
          Visual Information Fidelity (VIF, [18]) quantifies the Shannon information present in a
processed image. As summarized in [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ], VIF uses a natural scene model based on a Gaussian
scale mixture model in the wavelet domain. The visual distortion is modeled as a stationary,
zero-mean, additive white Gaussian noise process in the wavelet domain e = c + n , and f = d +
n, where e, n, and f are the random coefficient vectors for the same wavelet subband in the
perceived original and perceived distorted image. We model c, a collection of M neighboring
wavelet coefficients from a local patch in a subband, as c = √zu, where u is a zero-mean Gaussian
vector and √z is an independent scalar random variable. Random vectors c and d are from the
same location in the same subband for the original and distorted image, and
n denotes the
independent white Gaussian noise with the covariance matrix Cn = σ2n. The VIF is defined as:
VIF =
 ( ; | )
 ( ; | )
= ∑∑ ==11  ((    ;;  ||  ))
(10)
where i is the index of local coefficient patches, including all subbands.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-3">
        <title>2.3. Detector Exercised in our Study</title>
        <p>We select two state-of-the-art attack detectors as adversarial defenses, namely MagNet [23]
and Feature Squeezing [24]. MagNet [23] exercises an autoencoder trained on the normal
images to reconstruct an input image before it is fed to the classifier. Once the image is
reconstructed, the detector computes the reconstruction error between the input x and a
reformed input x', and applies a threshold learned during the training to target a specific false
positive rate (FPR). If the image is normal, the reconstruction error lies below the target
threshold; otherwise, the input  is marked as an adversarial attack. Feature Squeezing
(Squeezer, [24]) compares the prediction of the classifier on the inputs with the predictions
obtained using pre-processed inputs. The Squeezer detector computes a score that is the
maximum distance among these predictions and then applies a threshold that is learned in an
unsupervised fashion to target a specific FPR on the training set.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3. Installing the Libertinus fonts</title>
      <p>We set up an experimental campaign to group adversarial attacks. Our experimental
methodology is in Section 3.1, and details on attacks, image classifiers, and detectors are in
Section 3.2. We execute the experiments on a Dell Precision 5820 Tower with an Intel I9- 9920X,
GPU NVIDIA Quadro RTX6000 with 24GB VRAM, 128GB RAM, Ubuntu 18.04 with kernel 5.4.0,
and runtime CUDA 11.0.</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>3.1. Methodology</title>
        <p>We first generate adversarial images targeting two state-of-the-art models. We apply the 12
attacks in Section 2.1 with multiple configurations on the first 100 images of the CIFAR-10
dataset [25]. Out of the existing benchmark datasets for image classification, we choose
CIFAR10 [25] because it is composed of RGB images that have a reasonable size to make experiments
feasible. We detail the selected image classifiers and the attack configurations in Section 3.2.
Then, we compute distance metrics (both L-norms and image quality metrics) between each of
the adversarial and original (clean) images. We feed the adversarial images to both detectors
MagNet [23] and Feature Squeezing [24], logging their answer: 0 if the attack was not detected,
1 otherwise. These actions allow building a tabular dataset as in Table 1, which contains the
following data for each adversarial image: i) the values of the 12 distance metrics, ii) the success
outcome (i.e., does the attack trigger a misclassification?), iii) binary flags that indicate if either
MagNet [23] or Feature Squeezing [24] can detect that the image was counterfeited, and iv) the
attack configuration (not in the paper for brevity). This data will allow conducting the following
three analyses detailed below</p>
        <p>Distance metric clusters. We analyze the values of distance metrics to investigate if grouping
adversarial images according to the perturbation they apply is meaningful. Intuitively, distance
metrics quantify different perturbation aspects: we want to investigate if they capture
differences between the way attack images are constructed. For this purpose, we run several
clustering algorithms and check if images created using (the same or) different attacks are
grouped.</p>
        <p>Correlation between distance metrics and the success rate of the target classifier. We investigate
if distance metrics are informative enough to predict the success of an attack against the target
classifier. This allows discovering if distance metrics relate to the success of a given attack.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>3.2. Target Target Attacks, Image Classifier, and Detectors</title>
        <p>
          We selected two trained state-of-the-art classifiers, namely ConvNet12 from [33] and
ResNet50 [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">52</xref>
          ]. The ConvNet12 model is composed of 6 convolutional layers, 1 dense layer, 3
pooling layers, and 3 dropout layers with 2 923 050 trainable parameters, and an accuracy of
0.85 on the CIFAR-10 test set. The ResNet50 architecture is the one provided by Keras and is
composed of 4 convolutional layers with 26 162 698 trainable parameters.
        </p>
        <p>We configure MagNet [23] and Feature Squeezing [24] to defend our models. We train
MagNet using 5 000 normal images from the CIFAR-10 training set, with a False Positive Rate
(FPR) of ≈ 0.02. We set the threshold for Feature Squeezing manually to have the same FPR on
the test set.</p>
        <p>We craft attacks using the ART Toolbox [35]. In Table 2 in the appendix A, we report the
number of configurations applied for each attack and the configuration values.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>4. Results and Discussion</title>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>4.1. Distance Metrics Cluster</title>
        <p>
          We run the clustering algorithms K-Means, DBSCAN, and variants of the
ExpectationMaximization and Self-Organizing Maps that suit clustering analyses and are available in the
WEKA toolkit [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">51</xref>
          ]. However, we found that K-Means with k = {2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12} provided us
with enough information to search for groups of attacks based on the values of the collected
distance metrics. We start with k=2 without observing distinct groups of attacks. Then we
increase the number of possible group k to investigate if we can observe a well-defined
partitioning. In distance metric cluster analysis and Table 3 in the appendix, we report the
detailed analysis when k = 12 for both the ConvNet12 and the ResNet50 models. In the analysis,
we observed some distinct groupings of adversarial attacks based on their similarities. Notably,
attacks like BIM, PGD, and FGM clustered together, which was expected as BIM and PGD can
be considered iterative versions of FGM. BOUND HOP ELA are grouped by the two analyses
with no clear explanation based on mathematical formulation, indicating a unique relationship
discerned solely through distance metrics. JSMA and NEW form isolated clusters suggesting
that they are different from any other attacks.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>4.2. Correlation between Distance Metrics and Behavior of the Classifier</title>
        <p>We look for a correlation between the success rate of the attack and the values of the selected
metrics, to the extent that we can predict the success rate with minimal error. We measure our
prediction capability by computing the cosine distance CD between the actual and the predicted
success rate of the adversarial images on the target classifier. More specifically, we train an
XGBoost regressor with the distance metrics of the adversarial images and the attack outcome
to predict the success of each adversarial image. Given the distance metrics computed from an
adversarial image as input, the trained regressor outputs a good estimation of the success
probability, i.e., the CD is generally low. We repeat the study by training the regressor multiple
times using adversarial images generated from the same attack and testing on adversarial
images generated using the other attacks. This shows the mutual predictability of the success
rate between attacks, which we can use to understand if two attacks are similar. According to
the distance metric cluster analysis in Section 4.1, both models grouped BIM and FGM.
However, unlike the cluster analysis, PGD was excluded from this grouping, indicating a
weaker similarity compared to the other two attacks. We report in correlation between distance
metrics and the behavior of the target classifier and Table 4 in the appendix the detailed
discussion and the related data, respectively.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-3">
        <title>4.3. Correlation between Distance Metrics and the Detector Outputs</title>
        <p>We quantify the correlation between the detectability of an adversarial image and the value
of the distance metrics. In this case, we train an XGBoost classifier by using distance metrics as
input features, to predict the binary output (detected/undetected) of a detector, either Squeezer
or MagNet. Similarly to the previous experiment, the attacks in the columns of Table 5.a and
Table 5.b are used for training, and the attacks in the rows are used for testing. Each cell of the
table reports the mean Matthew Correlation Coefficient (MCC) obtained by XGBoost when
predicting the outputs of MagNet and Squeezer detectors. Notably, BOUND and HOP exhibited
strong mutual predictability, with MCC scores indicating their ability to predict each other's
detectability. Additionally, CW attacks showed some predictive capability for BOUND and
HOP. However, PGD, UNI, and ZOO attacks showed no mutual predictability with any other
attacks.</p>
        <p>On the ResNet50 model, PGD, UNI, and ZOO attacks displayed poor predictability with other
attacks, with MCC scores near zero. Conversely, BIM, BOUND, DEEP, ELA, FGM, HOP, JSMA,
and NEW attacks showed some degree of predictability with each other, suggesting
relationships between these attacks. Notably, HOP and BOUND exhibited the strongest mutual
predictability, consistent with previous findings. Furthermore, while BIM, FGM, and DEEP
attacks demonstrated predictive capability for each other on ResNet50, this relationship was
not observed in the ConvNet12 results.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-4">
        <title>4.4. Concluding Discussion</title>
        <p>We aggregate together the results of each of the three analyses for both models, respectively,
in Figure 1.a and 1.b. The x-axis refers to the clustering analysis in Section 4.1 for clusters k=2,
the y-axis to the CD scores in Section 4.2, and the z-axis to the MCC scores in Section 4.3.</p>
        <p>From the ConvNet12 analysis in Figure 1.a, two groups can be identified easily. BOUND,
HOP, and ELA are very close (BOUND and HOP are almost overlapping), while PGD is a bit far
from BIM and FGM: since PGD has success rate 1, its scores in the analysis in Section 4.2 are
not meaningful and are represented as 0 in the plot. Interestingly, CW2 is overall close to
BOUND, HOP, and ELA, even if not so evidently as those three attacks. Other attacks are far
from anyone else such as NEW or JSMA. DEEP, UNI and ZOO. Note that they are visually close
in Figure 1.a, but according to the clustering analysis, they belong to neither group when k=2,
and the other two analyses report contradicting results. This may suggest that those three
attacks could represent a new group. However, the results of the other analyses do not confirm
this result.</p>
        <p>a) Aggregated results on ConvNet12.</p>
        <sec id="sec-4-4-1">
          <title>b) Aggregated results on ResNet50.</title>
          <p>From the ResNet50 results in Figure 1.b, we can identify one group composed of BOUND,
HOP, and NEW. BOUND and HOP are very close to each other, validating the outcome of the
ConvNet12 analysis. Differently, ELA is not included in the group as the detection axis has
opposite scores (BOUND and HOP have a score near -0.5 while ELA is 0.5). In Figure 1.b, ZOO
and JSMA are very close suggesting a possible group, but this is just due to the view angle of
the plot: the two attacks show different scores on each of the 3 dimensions. Differently, JSMA
and ZOO are closer to each other but with different scores from the detectability analysis: JSMA
is likely part of a cluster, while UNI does not belong to any of them. DEEP is the farthest from
all the others, forming a group by itself. According to the results of detectability and
classification analyses, BIM and FGM are likely to be in the same group. However, they are very
far from each other as it results from the clustering analysis. This contrasts with what we
observed in Figure 1.a, in which they are grouped strongly.</p>
          <p>We proposed an experimental methodology to identify the most suitable attack set when
testing defenses against evasion attacks. The overall idea is to apply distance metrics to group
attacks that introduce a similar perturbation on the image and have a similar effect on the target
classifier. While the analysis performed on the two models shows some discriminative power,
it does not provide enough evidence to drive guidelines that can reduce the number or types of
attacks to be used when testing a defense. Results on ConvNet12 and ResNet50 agree in
grouping BOUND and HOP attacks, which, share the same approach to craft attacks, according
to the mathematical formulation. In weaker form, BIM and FGM are also grouped, with
experiments on ConvNet12 giving a solid grouping and experiments in ResNet50 partially
confirming the result. This is somehow expected as BIM is the iterative form of the FGM attack.
However, this result alone applies only to those specific attacks, and no relevant relations are
found in all the other cases.</p>
          <p>In conclusion, our preliminary assessment suggests that measuring the adversarial
perturbations does not provide a sensitive proxy to select diverse attack classes, meaning that
different attack methods, with distinct mathematical formulations, do not introduce
distinguishable (measurable) perturbations in the image. However, the methodology should be
further enriched to provide additional verification of these results. This can be achieved by
applying a broader range of models and attack methods, as well as identifying different metrics.
However, the preliminary results we obtained are quite worrying. When evaluating a defense,
it is risky to reduce the diversity of attacks, because the exhaustiveness of the evaluation can
be unexpectedly compromised by essentially any reduction attempt.</p>
        </sec>
      </sec>
    </sec>
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    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Appendix</title>
      <p>
        Attack configuration parameters. In Table 2 we report the configuration parameters used to craft
the attacks in the experimental campaign. How these values are combined, and all configuration
details can be found at [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">52</xref>
        ] along with the code used for the generation. All the images
generated and the code to reproduce our experiments are at [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">52</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>Distance metrics cluster analysis. First, we observe in Table 3.a that cluster 5 and cluster 8
group all the attacks except, again, BIM and PGD. On the contrary, some clusters indicate small
groups of attacks. Cluster 2 and 11 strengthen the BIM, FGM, and PGD grouping. We also
identify a group of attacks composed of HOP, BOUND, and ELA, in clusters 3, 5, and 8. Another
cluster group is composed of ZOO and DEEP, which mostly fall in clus ters 5, 8, 9, and 12.
Interestingly, the ZOO attack does not share its mathematical formulation with DEEP but
generates a perturbation that distance metrics quantify very similar to the perturbation created
by DEEP. Lastly, we observe that the JSMA attack is different from any other attack since it is</p>
      <p>a) Results with k=12 clusters, using the ConvNet12 model
b) Results with k=12 clusters, using the ResNet50 model
1
r
e
t
s
u
l
c
the only attack that gets assigned to clusters 4 and 7. The analysis shows similar results
concerning the ResNet50 model (Table 3.b). The BIM, FGM, and PGD group seems confirmed
since the three attacks are the only ones with high scores in clusters 4 and 5. This is somehow
expected as the Basic Iterative Method (BIM) and Projected Gradient Descent Attack (PGD) can
be considered iterative versions of FGM [31]. As observed in ConvNet12 results, JSMA is
isolated in clusters 1, 2, and 12 suggesting no similarities for the other attacks. Differently,
cluster 9 evidences a big group of attacks. However, BOUND and HOP show a score
(respectively, 1 and 0.998) that is significantly higher than the others, suggesting a stronger
similarity. Further, ELA and NEW provide scores that are high (respectively, 0.768 and 0.747)
but separated from the rest of the scores. This trend agrees partially with the analysis on
ConvNet12 that groups together BOUND, HOP, and ELA, while NEW is excluded. The
similarity between HOP and BOUND with the ELA and NEW cannot be explained or confirmed
by checking their mathematical formulation, and it is a relation observable solely thanks to the
distance metrics. Differently from the ConvNet12 case, DEEP and ZOO are not similar and form
isolated groups (clusters 7 and 8 of Table 3.b). Lastly, UNI is different from any other attack
according to the analysis of both models.</p>
      <p>Correlation between distance metrics and the behavior of the target classifier. We show the
results of, respectively, the ConvNet12 and the ResNet50 models in Table 4.b and Table 4.b. The
columns report the attacks used to train the regressors, while the rows enlist the attacks used
to test the regressors. Each cell i,j of the tables reports the CD when predicting the success rate</p>
      <p>Trained using distance metrics from the adversarial images of attacks:</p>
      <sec id="sec-6-1">
        <title>b) Results obtained on the ResNet50 model.</title>
        <p>Trained using distance metrics from the adversarial images of attacks:
Tested on:</p>
        <p>BIM</p>
        <p>BOUND</p>
        <p>DEEP</p>
        <p>FGM</p>
        <p>HOP</p>
        <p>JSMA</p>
        <p>NEW</p>
        <p>PGD
of the attack in the i-th row using as a training set the attack in the j-th column. The CD is low
(i.e., there is mutual predictability) in most cases: therefore, it is more interesting to observe the
combinations for which the CD is high. Considering ConvNet12 and Table 4.a, it is the case of
FGM against all attacks but BIM and PGD; also, BIM shows low CD only when paired with
FGM. UNI shows good predictability when used to train the regressor, but rather poor
predictability if it is used as a test set: therefore, we cannot get actionable information about
this attack. Similar results can be observed in the ResNet50 analysis (Table 4.b). BIM can predict
with CD=0 the success rate of FGM, PGD, and UNI, with a very low CD in detecting JSMA (see
the 1st column in Table 4.b). We obtain similar results using FGM as training, showing a CD=0
in predicting BIM, PGD, and UNI. Using both UNI and PGD, the CD is 0 except for BIM and
FGM. This seems to define a group composed of BIM and FGM, excluding UNI and PGD.</p>
        <p>Correlation between distance metrics and the detector outputs. In Table 5.a, we observe that
BOUND and HOP show mutual predictability. BOUND can predict the detectability of HOP
with MCC=0.698, whereas, using HOP to predict the detectability of BOUND, we obtain
MCC=0.642. CW attacks seem grouped with BOUND and HOP: if used as the training set, it can
predict the detectability of HOP and BOUND attacks with an MCC of roughly 0.42. The results
are similar if using HOP to predict CW2 (MCC = 0.365) but are lower using BOUND attacks
(MCC = 0.234). Using HOP, BOUND, and CW2 as training sets shows some capabilities in
detecting the BIM attack, however, the MCC scores are very low (below 0.3). The PGD attacks
are not considered because it has a detection rate of 1.0 and as such cannot be efficiently used
to train a classifier. Training with JSMA shows MCC of 0.360, 0.350, and 0.381 when tested with
BOUND, CW2, and HOP respectively. Despite there being no mutual predictability between
JSMA and these attacks (using CW2, BOUND, and HOP in the training, and JSMA as a test
shows a low MCC), training on JSMA offers some capability to predict the others. The UNI,
ZOO, NEW, and DEEP attacks are the ones with the lowest average MCC if used as training.</p>
        <p>We repeat the analysis on the ResNet50 model, considering all the attacks except for CW2
which is computationally too complex to generate with our hardware. We show the results in
Table 5.b. PGD, UNI, and ZOO do not have mutual predictability with any other attacks. Each
of them shows an MCC score near 0 in predicting the detectability of each other, with a few
exceptions showing a low MCC score. PGD, UNI, and ZOO are predicted poorly by other
attacks. BIM, BOUND, DEEP, ELA, FGM, HOP, JSMA, and NEW attacks appear somehow
related: attacks can be predicted by or can predict others. These results can be easily seen by
looking at the rows of Table 5.b: except for PGD, UNI, and ZOO, there is no attack with the
majority of MCC score to zero. The only exception is the BOUND attack (in the 2nd column) that
shows MCC greater than 0 only in predicting BIM, HOP, and NEW. Also, the MCC score
obtained using NEW when training suggests that NEW can be related to BIM, DEEP, ELA, FGM,
HOP, and JSMA. The strongest similarity between attacks is observed for HOP and BOUND,
with HOP being the only attack that shows MCC substantially greater than 0 in detecting
BOUND. This result is consistent with the BOUND and HOP group evidenced by the ConvNet12
results. Differently from ConvNet12 results, BIM can predict FGM and DEEP with, respectively,
MCC=0.60 and MCC=0.48. We obtain analogous results using FGM or DEEP in the training.
FGM achieves MCC=0.50 in predicting BIM and MCC=0.62 in predicting DEEP. Similarly DEEP
can predict BIM and FGM with MCC=0.39 and MCC=0.47.
0.234
0.043
0.262
0.071
0.698
0.143
0.149
0.018
0.074
0.117</p>
        <p>Trained using distance metrics from the adversarial images of attacks:</p>
        <p>BOUND CW2
ZOO</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-6-2">
        <title>b) Results obtained using the ResNet50 model.</title>
        <p>Trained using distance metrics from the adversarial images of attacks:
BIM BOUND DEEP ELA FGM HOP JSMA NEW PGD
UNI</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
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