Modern neural networks are highly non-robust against adversarial
manipulation. A significant amount of work has been invested in techniques to
compute lower bounds on robustness through formal guarantees and to build
provably robust models. However, it is still difficult to get guarantees for
larger networks or robustness against larger perturbations. Thus attack
strategies are needed to provide tight upper bounds on the actual robustness.
We significantly improve the randomized gradient-free attack for ReLU networks
[9], in particular by scaling it up to large networks. We show that our attack
achieves similar or significantly smaller robust accuracy than state-of-the-art
attacks like PGD or the one of Carlini and Wagner, thus revealing an
overestimation of the robustness by these state-of-the-art methods. Our attack
is not based on a gradient descent scheme and in this sense gradient-free,
which makes it less sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters as no careful
selection of the stepsize is required.