NIST Identifies Types of Cyberattacks That Manipulate Behavior of AI Systems

NIST Identifies Types of Cyberattacks That Manipulate Behavior of AI Systems

An AI system can malfunction if an adversary finds a way to confuse its decision making. In this example, errant markings on the road mislead a driverless car, potentially making it veer into oncoming traffic. This “evasion” attack is one of numerous adversarial tactics described in a new NIST publication intended to help outline the types of attacks we might expect along with approaches to mitigate them.



Credit: N. Hanacek/NIST


Adversaries can deliberately confuse or even “poison” artificial intelligence (AI) systems to make them malfunction — and there’s no foolproof defense that their developers can employ. Computer scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their collaborators identify these and other vulnerabilities of AI and machine learning (ML) in a new publication.


Their work, titled Adversarial Machine Learning: A Taxonomy and Terminology of Attacks and Mitigations (NIST.AI.100-2), is part of NIST’s broader effort to support the development of trustworthy AI, and it can help put NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework into practice. The publication, a collaboration among government, academia and industry, is intended to help AI developers and users get a handle on the types of attacks they might expect along with approaches to mitigate them — with the understanding that there is no silver bullet.


“We are providing an overview of attack techniques and methodologies that consider all types of AI systems,” said NIST computer scientist Apostol Vassilev, one of the publication’s authors. “We also describe current mitigation strategies reported in the literature, but these available defenses currently lack robust assurances that they fully mitigate the ri ..

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