AI consumes a lot of energy. Hackers could make it consume more.

The attack: But this kind of neural network means if you change the input, such as the image it's fed, you can change how much computation it needs to solve it. This opens up a vulnerability that hackers could exploit, as the researchers from the Maryland Cybersecurity Center outlined in a new paper being presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations this week. By adding small amounts of noise to a network's inputs, they made it perceive the inputs as more difficult and jack up its computation. When they assumed the attacker had full information about the neural network, they were able to max out its energy draw. When they assumed the attacker had limited to no information, they were still able to slow down the network's processing and increase energy usage by 20% to 80%.