Author: Richard Bonett

The idea behind defense in depth is to manage risk with diverse defensive strategies, so that if one layer of defense turns out to be inadequate, another layer of defense hopefully prevents a full breach.

Let’s go back to our example of bank security. Why is the typical bank more secure than the typical convenience store? Because there are many redundant security measures protecting the bank, and the more measures there are, the more secure the place is.

Security cameras alone are a deterrent for some. But if people don’t care about the cameras, then a security guard is there to defend the bank physically with a gun. Two security guards provide even more protection. But if both security guards get shot by masked bandits, then at least there’s still a wall of bulletproof glass and electronically locked doors to protect the tellers from the robbers. Of course if the robbers happen to kick in the doors, or guess the code for the door, at least they can only get at the teller registers, because the bank has a vault protecting the really valuable stuff. Hopefully, the vault is protected by several locks and cannot be opened without two individuals who are rarely at the bank at the same time. And as for the teller registers, they can be protected by having dye-emitting bills stored at the bottom, for distribution during a robbery.

Of course, having all these security measures does not ensure that the bank is never successfully robbed. Bank robberies do happen, even at banks with this much security. Nonetheless, it’s pretty obvious that the sum total of all these defenses results in a far more effective security system than any one defense alone.

The defense-in-depth principle may seem somewhat contradictory to the “secure-the-weakest-link” principle because we are essentially saying that defenses taken as a whole can be stronger than the weakest link. How­ever, there is no contradiction. The principle “secure the weakest link” applies when components have security functionality that does not overlap. But when it comes to redundant security measures, it is indeed possible that the sum protection offered is far greater than the protection offered by any single component.

ML systems are constructedout ofnumerous components.  And, as we pointed out multiple times above, the data are often the most important thing from a security perspective. This means that bad actors haveasmany opportunities to exploitan ML system as there are components, and then some. Each and every component comes with a set of risks, and each and every one needs to address those risks head on.  But wait, there’s more. Defense in depth teaches that vulnerabilities not addressed (or attacks not covered) by one component should, in principle, be caught by another. In some cases a risk may be controlled “upstream” and in others “downstream.”  

Lets consider anexample: a given ML system designmay attempt to secure sensitive training data behind some kind of authentication and authorization system, only allowing the model access to the data while it is actually training. While this may well bea reasonable and well-justified practice, it is by no means sufficient to ensure that no sensitive information in the dataset can be leaked through malicious misuse/abuse of the system as a whole. Some ML models are vulnerable to leaking sensitive information via carefully selected queries made to the operating model.^[i] In other cases, lots of know-how in “learned” form may be leaked through a transfer attack.^[ii] Maintaining a history of queries made by users, and preventing subsequent queries that together could be used to divine sensitive information can serve as an additional defensive layer that protects against these kinds of attack.  

Practicing defense in depth naturally involves applying the principle of least privilegeto users and operations engineers of an ML system. Identifying and preventing security exploits is much easier when every component limits its accessto only theresources it actually requires.  In this case, identifying and separating components in a design can help, because components become natural trust boundaries where controls can be put in place and policies enforced.

Defense in depth is especially powerful when each component works in concert with the others.

Read the rest of the principles here.

^[i]M. Fredrikson, S. Jha, and T. Ristenpart, “Model Inversion Attacks That Exploit Confidence Information and Basic Countermeasures,” Proceedings of the 22Nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2015, pp. 1322–1333.

^[ii]B. Wang, Y. Yao, B. Viswanath, H. Zheng, and B. Y. Zhao, “With Great Training Comes Great Vulnerability: Practical Attacks against Transfer Learning,” 27th USENIX Security Symposium, 2018, pp. 1281–1297.

Security people are quick to point out that security is like a chain.  And just as a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, an ML system is only as secure as its weakest component.  Want to anticipate where bad guys will attack your ML system?  Well, think through which part would be easiest to attack.

ML systems are different from many other artifacts that we engineer because the data in ML are just as important (or sometimes even more important) than the learning mechanism itself.  That means we need to pay even more attention to the data used to train, test, and operate an ML system than we might in a standard system.

In some sense, this turns the idea of an attack surface on its head. To understand what we mean, consider that the training data in an ML system may often come from a public location­—that is, one that may be subject to poor data protection controls. If that’s the case, perhaps the easiest way to attack an ML system of this flavor would be through polluting or otherwise manipulating the data before it even arrives. An attacker wins if they get to the ML-critical data before the ML system even starts to learn. Who cares about the public API of the trained up and operating ML system if the data used to build it were already maliciously constructed?

Thinking about ML data as money makes a good exercise.  Where does the “money” (that is, data) in the system come from?  How is it stored?  Can counterfeit money help in an attack? Does all of the money get compressed into high value storage in one place (say the weights and thresholds learned in the ML systems’ distributed representation)?  How does money come out of an ML system?  Can money be transferred to an attacker?  How would that work?

Lets stretch this analogy ever farther. When it comes to actual money, a sort of perverse logic pervades the physical security world. There’s generally more money in a bank than a convenience store, but which one is more likely to be held up? The convenience store, because banks tend to have much stronger security precautions. Convenience stores are a much easier target. Of course the payoff for successfully robbing a convenience store is much lower than knocking off a bank, but it is probably a lot easier to get away from the convenience store crime scene. To stretch our analogy a bit, you want to look for and better defend the convenience stores in your ML system.

ML has another weird factor that is worth considering—that is that much of the source code is open and re-used all over the place.  Should you trust that algorithm that you snagged from GitHub? How does it work? Does it protect those oh so valuable data sets you built up?  What if the algorithm itself is sneakily compromised?  These are some potential weak links that may not be considered in a traditional security stance.

Identifying the weakest component of a system falls directly out of a good risk analysis. Given good risk analysis information, addressing the most serious risk first, instead of a risk that may be easiest to mitigate, is always prudent. Security resources should be doled out according to risk. Deal with one or two major problems, and move on to the remaining ones in order of severity.

Of course, this strategy can be applied forever, because 100% security is never attainable. There is a clear need for some stopping point. It is okay to stop addressing risks when all components appear to be within the thresh­old of acceptable risk. The notion of acceptability depends on the business propo­sition.

All of our analogies aside, good security practice dictates an approach that identifies and strengthens weak links until an acceptable level of risk is achieved.

Read the rest of the principles here.