Noise warfare

In his 5th century treatise on war, Sun Tzu famously proclaimed "If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you will be victorious in numerous battles." Of course, Sun Tzu was fighting with swords and arrows, not keystrokes and algorithms, but the principle is just as applicable to cyber warfare as it was to ancient Chinese battlefields. Among the most vulnerable targets in cyberwarfare are deep neural networks. These deep-learning machines are vital for computer vision -- including in autonomous vehicles -- speech recognition, robotics and more. "Since people started to get really enthusiastic about the possibilities of deep learning, there has been a race to the bottom to find ways to fool the machine learning algorithms," said Yaron Singer, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).