AVA: Inconspicuous Attribute Variation-based Adversarial Attack bypassing DeepFake Detection

While DeepFake applications are becoming popular in recent years, their abuses pose a serious privacy threat. Unfortunately, most related detection algorithms to mitigate the abuse issues are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks because they are built atop DNN-based classification models, and the literature has demonstrated that they could be bypassed by introducing pixel-level perturbations. Though corresponding mitigation has been proposed, we have identified a new attribute-variation-based adversarial attack (AVA) that perturbs the latent space via a combination of Gaussian prior and semantic discriminator to bypass such mitigation. It perturbs the semantics in the attribute space of DeepFake images, which are inconspicuous to human beings (e.g., mouth open) but can result in substantial differences in DeepFake detection. We evaluate our proposed AVA attack on nine state-of-the-art DeepFake detection algorithms and applications. The empirical results demonstrate that AVA attack defeats the state-of-the-art black box attacks against DeepFake detectors and achieves more than a 95% success rate on two commercial DeepFake detectors. Moreover, our human study indicates that AVA-generated DeepFake images are often imperceptible to humans, which presents huge security and privacy concerns.