Bit-Flip Induced Latency Attacks in Object Detection

Manojna Sistla, Yu Wen, Aamir Bader Shah, Chenpei Huang, Lening Wang, Xuqing Wu, Jiefu Chen, Miao Pan, Xin Fu; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 6709-6718

Deep learning and computer vision have experienced significant advancements particularly in critical applications such as autonomous driving and real-time surveillance where object detection (OD) plays a pivotal role. Ensuring the accuracy and speed of these systems is paramount to prevent accidents or failures. Recently latency-based attacks have emerged as a new threat driven by the essential need for real-time performance in various applications. These attacks target model responsiveness to disrupt system performance without necessarily compromising accuracy. Our preliminary experiments show that introducing just a few bit flips to key parameters in OD models can significantly increase latency degrading performance. Meanwhile recent advancements in memory-based attacks such as Row Hammer demonstrate the ability to conveniently introduce bit flips at desired locations without physical hardware interaction. Based on the observations we propose a novel attack on OD models that leverages row-hammer to introduce bit-flips via side channels targeting the non-maximum suppression (NMS) filter and significantly increasing latency. Unlike previous methods that modify input data our technique ensures efficiency by minimizing bit-flips through critical path exploitation and achieves practical applicability with only a subset of validation data. Experiments across various datasets and models validate our approach demonstrating latency increases up to 71.6 ms (20.4x) with just 31 bit-flips.