Your Attack Is Too DUMB: Formalizing Attacker Scenarios for Adversarial
  Transferability
Marco Alecci Mauro Conti Francesco Marchiori Luca Martinelli Luca Pajola
Evasion attacks are a threat to machine learning models, where adversaries
attempt to affect classifiers by injecting malicious samples. An alarming
side-effect of evasion attacks is their ability to transfer among different
models: this property is called transferability. Therefore, an attacker can
produce adversarial samples on a custom model (surrogate) to conduct the attack
on a victim's organization later. Although literature widely discusses how
adversaries can transfer their attacks, their experimental settings are limited
and far from reality. For instance, many experiments consider both attacker and
defender sharing the same dataset, balance level (i.e., how the ground truth is
distributed), and model architecture.
  In this work, we propose the DUMB attacker model. This framework allows
analyzing if evasion attacks fail to transfer when the training conditions of
surrogate and victim models differ. DUMB considers the following conditions:
Dataset soUrces, Model architecture, and the Balance of the ground truth. We
then propose a novel testbed to evaluate many state-of-the-art evasion attacks
with DUMB; the testbed consists of three computer vision tasks with two
distinct datasets each, four types of balance levels, and three model
architectures. Our analysis, which generated 13K tests over 14 distinct
attacks, led to numerous novel findings in the scope of transferable attacks
with surrogate models. In particular, mismatches between attackers and victims
in terms of dataset source, balance levels, and model architecture lead to
non-negligible loss of attack performance.