Misleading learners: Co-opting your spam filter
Blaine Nelson, Marco Barreno, Fuching Jack Chi, Anthony D. Joseph, Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein, Udam Saina, Charles Sutton, J. D. Tygar and Kai Xai
In: Machine Learning in Cyber Trust: Security, Privacy, Reliability (2009) Springer . ISBN 978-0-387-88734-0

Abstract

Using statistical machine learning for making security decisions introduces new vulnerabilities in large scale systems. We show how an adversary can exploit statistical machine learning, as used in the SpamBayes spam filter, to ren- der it useless—even if the adversary’s access is limited to only 1% of the spam training messages. We demonstrate three new attacks that successfully make the filter unusable, prevent victims from receiving specific email messages, and cause spam emails to arrive in the victim’s inbox.

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