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Abstract
We present Timber, the first white-box poisoning attack targeting decision
trees. Timber is based on a greedy attack strategy leveraging sub-tree
retraining to efficiently estimate the damage performed by poisoning a given
training instance. The attack relies on a tree annotation procedure which
enables sorting training instances so that they are processed in increasing
order of computational cost of sub-tree retraining. This sorting yields a
variant of Timber supporting an early stopping criterion designed to make
poisoning attacks more efficient and feasible on larger datasets. We also
discuss an extension of Timber to traditional random forest models, which is
useful because decision trees are normally combined into ensembles to improve
their predictive power. Our experimental evaluation on public datasets shows
that our attacks outperform existing baselines in terms of effectiveness,
efficiency or both. Moreover, we show that two representative defenses can
mitigate the effect of our attacks, but fail at effectively thwarting them.