Skip connections are an essential component of current state-of-the-art deep
neural networks (DNNs) such as ResNet, WideResNet, DenseNet, and ResNeXt.
Despite their huge success in building deeper and more powerful DNNs, we
identify a surprising security weakness of skip connections in this paper. Use
of skip connections allows easier generation of highly transferable adversarial
examples. Specifically, in ResNet-like (with skip connections) neural networks,
gradients can backpropagate through either skip connections or residual
modules. We find that using more gradients from the skip connections rather
than the residual modules according to a decay factor, allows one to craft
adversarial examples with high transferability. Our method is termed Skip
Gradient Method(SGM). We conduct comprehensive transfer attacks against
state-of-the-art DNNs including ResNets, DenseNets, Inceptions,
Inception-ResNet, Squeeze-and-Excitation Network (SENet) and robustly trained
DNNs. We show that employing SGM on the gradient flow can greatly improve the
transferability of crafted attacks in almost all cases. Furthermore, SGM can be
easily combined with existing black-box attack techniques, and obtain high
improvements over state-of-the-art transferability methods. Our findings not
only motivate new research into the architectural vulnerability of DNNs, but
also open up further challenges for the design of secure DNN architectures.