Tossing in the Dark: Practical Bit-Flipping on Gray-box Deep Neural Networks for Runtime Trojan Injection

Although Trojan attacks on deep neural networks (DNNs) have been extensively studied, the threat of run-time Trojan injection has only recently been brought to attention. Unlike data poisoning attacks that target the training stage of a DNN model, a run-time attack executes an exploit such as Rowhammer on memory to flip the bits of the target model and thereby implant a Trojan. This threat is stealthier but more challenging, as it requires flipping a set of bits in the target model to introduce an effective Trojan without noticeably downgrading the model's accuracy. This has been achieved only under the less realistic assumption that the target model is fully shared with the adversary through memory, thus enabling them to flip bits across all model layers, including the last few layers.

For the first time, we have investigated run-time Trojan Injection under a more realistic gray-box scenario. In this scenario, a model is perceived in an encoder-decoder manner: the encoder is public and shared through memory, while the decoder is private and so considered to be black-box and inaccessible to unauthorized parties. To address the unique challenge posed by the black-box decoder to Trojan injection in this scenario, we developed a suite of innovative techniques. Using these techniques, we constructed our gray-box attack, Groan, which stands out as both effective and stealthy. Our experiments show that Groan is capable of injecting a highly effective Trojan into the target model, while also largely preserving its performance, even in the presence of state-of-theart memory protection.