Physical Adversarial Attacks on Deep Neural Networks for Traffic Sign Recognition: A Feasibility Study

Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are increasingly applied in the real world in safety critical applications like advanced driver assistance systems. An example for such use case is represented by traffic sign recognition systems. At the same time, it is known that current DNNs can be fooled by adversarial attacks, which raises safety concerns if those attacks can be applied under realistic conditions. In this work we apply different black-box attack methods to generate perturbations that are applied in the physical environment and can be used to fool systems under different environmental conditions. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to combine a general framework for physical attacks with different black-box attack methods and study the impact of the different methods on the success rate of the attack under the same setting. We show that reliable physical adversarial attacks can be performed with different methods and that it is also possible to reduce the perceptibility of the resulting perturbations. The findings highlight the need for viable defenses of a DNN even in the black-box case, but at the same time form the basis for securing a DNN with methods like adversarial training which utilizes adversarial attacks to augment the original training data.