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AI Case Study

Attack on Machine Translation Services - AI Case Study

Machine translation services (such as Google Translate, Bing Translator, and Systran Translate) provide public-facing UIs and APIs. A research group at UC Berkeley utilized these public endpoints to create a replicated model with near-production state-of-the-art translation quality. Beyond demonstrating that IP can be functionally stolen from a black-box system, they used the replicated model to successfully trans...

ExerciseGoogle Translate, Bing Translator, Systran TranslateBerkeley Artificial Intelligence ResearchImpactResource DevelopmentAI Attack Staging

Overview

Case steps9Steps described in the case record.
Techniques9Attack methods mentioned in the case steps.
Linked CVEs0Known vulnerabilities mentioned in the record.

Risk patterns

Patterns found in the case record and its linked vulnerabilities.

  • 1Dominant ATLAS tactic. Impact appears in 3 case steps.
  • 2Multiple attack methods. The case connects to 9 unique AI attack methods.

Procedure timeline

Search the case steps or filter them by attacker goal.

Impact3Resource Development2AI Attack Staging2Reconnaissance1AI Model Access1
  1. Step 3

    Models

    Resource Development

    The researchers gathered similar model architectures that the target translation services used.

  2. Impact

    By replicating the model with high fidelity, the researchers demonstrated that an adversary could steal a model and violate the victim's intellectual property rights.

  3. AI Attack Staging

    The replicated models were used to generate adversarial examples that successfully transferred to the black-box translation services.

  4. Impact

    The adversarial examples were used to evade the machine translation services by a variety of means. This included targeted word flips, vulgar outputs, and dropped sentences.

  5. Impact

    Adversarial attacks can cause errors that cause reputational damage to the company of the translation service and decrease user trust in AI-powered services.

Mitigations

Defenses connected to the attack methods in this case.

Sources

Original public records and references for this case.

Original source

Original source links

Open the MITRE ATLAS data and public references used for this case study.