Neural networks are increasingly deployed in real-world safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving, aircraft collision avoidance, and malware detection. However, these networks have been shown to often mispredict on inputs with minor adversarial or even accidental perturbations. Consequences of such errors can be disastrous and even potentially fatal as shown by the recent Tesla autopilot crash. Thus, there is an urgent need for formal analysis systems that can rigorously check neural networks for violations of different safety properties such as robustness against adversarial perturbations within a certain $L$-norm of a given image. An effective safety analysis system for a neural network must be able to either ensure that a safety property is satisfied by the network or find a counterexample, i.e., an input for which the network will violate the property. Unfortunately, most existing techniques for performing such analysis struggle to scale beyond very small networks and the ones that can scale to larger networks suffer from high false positives and cannot produce concrete counterexamples in case of a property violation. In this paper, we present a new efficient approach for rigorously checking different safety properties of neural networks that significantly outperforms existing approaches by multiple orders of magnitude. Our approach can check different safety properties and find concrete counterexamples for networks that are 10$\times$ larger than the ones supported by existing analysis techniques. We believe that our approach to estimating tight output bounds of a network for a given input range can also help improve the explainability of neural networks and guide the training process of more robust neural networks.

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 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 formally check security properties by computing 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. 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 for the same security properties. ReluVal is able to prove a security property within 4 hours on a single 8-core machine without GPUs, while Reluplex deemed inconclusive due to timeout (more than 5 days). Our experiments demonstrate that symbolic interval analysis is a promising new direction towards rigorously analyzing different security properties of DNNs.