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The security of machine learning

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  • Published: 20 May 2010
  • Volume 81, pages 121–148, (2010)
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The security of machine learning
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  • Marco Barreno1,
  • Blaine Nelson1,
  • Anthony D. Joseph1 &
  • …
  • J. D. Tygar1 
  • 22k Accesses

  • 594 Citations

  • 17 Altmetric

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Abstract

Machine learning’s ability to rapidly evolve to changing and complex situations has helped it become a fundamental tool for computer security. That adaptability is also a vulnerability: attackers can exploit machine learning systems. We present a taxonomy identifying and analyzing attacks against machine learning systems. We show how these classes influence the costs for the attacker and defender, and we give a formal structure defining their interaction. We use our framework to survey and analyze the literature of attacks against machine learning systems. We also illustrate our taxonomy by showing how it can guide attacks against SpamBayes, a popular statistical spam filter. Finally, we discuss how our taxonomy suggests new lines of defenses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720-1776, USA

    Marco Barreno, Blaine Nelson, Anthony D. Joseph & J. D. Tygar

Authors
  1. Marco Barreno
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  2. Blaine Nelson
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  3. Anthony D. Joseph
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  4. J. D. Tygar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marco Barreno.

Additional information

Editors: Pavel Laskov and Richard Lippmann.

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Barreno, M., Nelson, B., Joseph, A.D. et al. The security of machine learning. Mach Learn 81, 121–148 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-010-5188-5

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  • Received: 08 April 2008

  • Revised: 15 April 2010

  • Accepted: 15 April 2010

  • Published: 20 May 2010

  • Issue Date: November 2010

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-010-5188-5

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Keywords

  • Security
  • Adversarial learning
  • Adversarial environments
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