Establishing unique identities for both humans and end systems has been an
active research problem in the security community, giving rise to innovative
machine learning-based authentication techniques. Although such techniques
offer an automated method to establish identity, they have not been vetted
against sophisticated attacks that target their core machine learning
technique. This paper demonstrates that mimicking the unique signatures
generated by host fingerprinting and biometric authentication systems is
possible. We expose the ineffectiveness of underlying machine learning
classification models by constructing a blind attack based around the query
synthesis framework and utilizing Explainable-AI (XAI) techniques. We launch an
attack in under 130 queries on a state-of-the-art face authentication system,
and under 100 queries on a host authentication system. We examine how these
attacks can be defended against and explore their limitations. XAI provides an
effective means for adversaries to infer decision boundaries and provides a new
way forward in constructing attacks against systems using machine learning
models for authentication.