The exponential adoption of machine learning (ML) is propelling the world
into a future of distributed and intelligent automation and data-driven
solutions. However, the proliferation of malicious data manipulation attacks
against ML, namely adversarial and backdoor attacks, jeopardizes its
reliability in safety-critical applications. The existing detection methods are
attack-specific and built upon some strong assumptions, limiting them in
diverse practical scenarios. Thus, motivated by the need for a more robust,
unified, and attack-agnostic defense mechanism, we first investigate the shared
traits of adversarial and backdoor attacks. Based on our observation, we
propose NoiSec, a reconstruction-based intrusion detection system that brings a
novel perspective by shifting focus from the reconstructed input to the
reconstruction noise itself, which is the foundational root cause of such
malicious data alterations. NoiSec disentangles the noise from the test input,
extracts the underlying features from the noise, and leverages them to
recognize systematic malicious manipulation. Our comprehensive evaluation of
NoiSec demonstrates its high effectiveness across various datasets, including
basic objects, natural scenes, traffic signs, medical images, spectrogram-based
audio data, and wireless sensing against five state-of-the-art adversarial
attacks and three backdoor attacks under challenging evaluation conditions.
NoiSec demonstrates strong detection performance in both white-box and
black-box adversarial attack scenarios, significantly outperforming the closest
baseline models, particularly in an adaptive attack setting. We will provide
the code for future baseline comparison. Our code and artifacts are publicly
available at https://github.com/shahriar0651/NoiSec.