Formal Security Analysis of Neural Networks using Symbolic Intervals

TL;DR

This paper introduces ReluVal, a novel method using symbolic interval analysis to formally verify security properties of neural networks efficiently, outperforming existing solver-based approaches significantly.

Contribution

The paper presents a new interval arithmetic-based approach for formal security analysis of DNNs that is more scalable and parallelizable than SMT solver methods.

Findings

ReluVal outperforms Reluplex by 200 times on average.

ReluVal verifies properties within hours that SMT solvers cannot verify in days.

Symbolic interval analysis effectively reduces overestimation in output bounds.

Abstract

Due to the increasing deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in real-world security-critical domains including autonomous vehicles and collision avoidance systems, formally checking security properties of DNNs, especially under different attacker capabilities, is becoming crucial. Most existing security testing techniques for DNNs try to find adversarial examples without providing any formal security guarantees about the non-existence of such adversarial examples. Recently, several projects have used different types of Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT) solvers to formally check security properties of DNNs. However, all of these approaches are limited by the high overhead caused by the solver. In this paper, we present a new direction for formally checking security properties of DNNs without using SMT solvers. Instead, we leverage interval arithmetic to compute rigorous bounds on the DNN outputs. Our approach, unlike existing solver-based approaches, is easily parallelizable. We further present symbolic interval analysis along with several other optimizations to minimize overestimations of output bounds. We design, implement, and evaluate our approach as part of ReluVal, a system for formally checking security properties of Relu-based DNNs. Our extensive empirical results show that ReluVal outperforms Reluplex, a state-of-the-art solver-based system, by 200 times on average. On a single 8-core machine without GPUs, within 4 hours, ReluVal is able to verify a security property that Reluplex deemed inconclusive due to timeout after running for more than 5 days. Our experiments demonstrate that symbolic interval analysis is a promising new direction towards rigorously analyzing different security properties of DNNs.