Imitation Attacks and Defenses for Black-box Machine Translation Systems

We consider an adversary looking to steal or attack a black-box machine translation (MT) system, either for financial gain or to exploit model errors. We first show that black-box MT systems can be stolen by querying them with monolingual sentences and training models to imitate their outputs. Using simulated experiments, we demonstrate that MT model stealing is possible even when imitation models have different input data or architectures than their victims. Applying these ideas, we train imitation models that reach within 0.6 BLEU of three production MT systems on both high-resource and low-resource language pairs. We then leverage the similarity of our imitation models to transfer adversarial examples to the production systems. We use gradient-based attacks that expose inputs which lead to semantically-incorrect translations, dropped content, and vulgar model outputs. To mitigate these vulnerabilities, we propose a defense that modifies translation outputs in order to misdirect the optimization of imitation models. This defense degrades imitation model BLEU and attack transfer rates at some cost in BLEU and inference speed.