Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which poses
security concerns on these algorithms due to the potentially severe
consequences. Adversarial attacks serve as an important surrogate to evaluate
the robustness of deep learning models before they are deployed. However, most
of existing adversarial attacks can only fool a black-box model with a low
success rate. To address this issue, we propose a broad class of momentum-based
iterative algorithms to boost adversarial attacks. By integrating the momentum
term into the iterative process for attacks, our methods can stabilize update
directions and escape from poor local maxima during the iterations, resulting
in more transferable adversarial examples. To further improve the success rates
for black-box attacks, we apply momentum iterative algorithms to an ensemble of
models, and show that the adversarially trained models with a strong defense
ability are also vulnerable to our black-box attacks. We hope that the proposed
methods will serve as a benchmark for evaluating the robustness of various deep
models and defense methods. With this method, we won the first places in NIPS
2017 Non-targeted Adversarial Attack and Targeted Adversarial Attack
competitions.