Attack on Machine Translation Services
Date: 2020-04-30
Affected: Google Translate, Bing Translator, Systran Translate
Attack vector: adversarial-input
Category: research
Severity: High

Machine translation services (such as Google Translate, Bing Translator, and Systran Translate) provide public-facing UIs and APIs. A research group at UC Berkeley utilized these public endpoints to create a replicated model with near-production state-of-the-art translation quality. Beyond demonstrating that IP can be functionally stolen from a black-box system, they used the replicated model to successfully transfer adversarial examples to the real production services. These adversarial inputs successfully cause targeted word flips, vulgar outputs, and dropped sentences on Google Translate and Systran Translate websites.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):