Deep learning models for graphs have advanced the state of the art on many
tasks. Despite their recent success, little is known about their robustness. We
investigate training time attacks on graph neural networks for node
classification that perturb the discrete graph structure. Our core principle is
to use meta-gradients to solve the bilevel problem underlying training-time
attacks, essentially treating the graph as a hyperparameter to optimize. Our
experiments show that small graph perturbations consistently lead to a strong
decrease in performance for graph convolutional networks, and even transfer to
unsupervised embeddings. Remarkably, the perturbations created by our algorithm
can misguide the graph neural networks such that they perform worse than a
simple baseline that ignores all relational information. Our attacks do not
assume any knowledge about or access to the target classifiers.