A Partial Break of the Honeypots Defense to Catch Adversarial Attacks

Abstract

A recent defense proposes to inject "honeypots" into neural networks in order to detect adversarial attacks. We break the baseline version of this defense by reducing the detection true positive rate to 0\% and the detection AUC to 0.02, maintaining the original distortion bounds. The authors of the original paper have amended the defense in their CCS'20 paper to mitigate this attacks. To aid further research, we release the complete 2.5 hour keystroke-by-keystroke screen recording of our attack process at https://nicholas.carlini.com/code/ccs_honeypot_break.