Stealthy poisoning attacks on PCA-based anomaly detectors
Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein, Blaine A. Nelson, Ling Huang, Anthony Douglas Joseph, Shing-hon Lau, Satish B. Rao, Nina Taft, J. D. Tygar · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 2009
We consider systems that use PCA-based detectors obtained from a comprehensive view of the network's traffic to identify anomalies in backbone networks. To assess these detectors' susceptibility to adversaries wishing to evade detection, we present and evaluate short-term and long-term data poisoning schemes that trade-off between poisoning duration and the volume of traffic injected for poisoning. Stealthy Boiling Frog attacks significantly reduce chaff volume,while only moderately increasing poisoning duration. ROC curves provide a comprehensive analysis of PCA-based detection on contaminated data, and show that even small attacks can undermine this otherwise successful anomaly detector.