Adversarial Perturbation Attacks on ML-based CAD

Abstract

There is substantial interest in the use of machine learning (ML)-based techniques throughout the electronic computer-aided design (CAD) flow, particularly those based on deep learning. However, while deep learning methods have surpassed state-of-the-art performance in several applications, they have exhibited intrinsic susceptibility to adversarial perturbations—small but deliberate alterations to the input of a neural network, precipitating incorrect predictions. In this article, we seek to investigate whether adversarial perturbations pose risks to ML-based CAD tools, and if so, how these risks can be mitigated. To this end, we use a motivating case study of lithographic hotspot detection, for which convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown great promise. In this context, we show the first adversarial perturbation attacks on state-of-the-art CNN-based hotspot detectors; specifically, we show that small (on average 0.5% modified area), functionality preserving, and design-constraint-satisfying changes to a layout can nonetheless trick a CNN-based hotspot detector into predicting the modified layout as hotspot free (with up to 99.7% success in finding perturbations that flip a detector’s output prediction, based on a given set of attack constraints). We propose an adversarial retraining strategy to improve the robustness of CNN-based hotspot detection and show that this strategy significantly improves robustness (by a factor of ~3) against adversarial attacks without compromising classification accuracy.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Aug 21, 2020
Source ID
10.1145/3408288

Entities

People

  • Bei Yu
  • Benjamin Tan
  • Evangeline F. Y. Young
  • Haoyu Yang
  • Kang Liu
  • Ramesh Karri
  • Siddharth Garg
  • Yuzhe Ma

Organizations

  • National Science Foundation
  • New York University
  • Office of Naval Research
  • The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Integrated Circuit Design and Technology.
  • Molecular and genetic basis of cancer.
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Learning Algorithms
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks
  • Microelectronics