Papers › Energy-Latency Attacks via Sponge Poisoning

Energy-Latency Attacks via Sponge Poisoning

14 Mar 2022arXiv:2203.08147archive 2025-07-28

Antonio Emanuele Cinà, Ambra Demontis, Battista Biggio, Fabio Roli, Marcello Pelillo

Sponge examples are test-time inputs optimized to increase energy consumption and prediction latency of deep networks deployed on hardware accelerators. By increasing the fraction of neurons activated during classification, these attacks reduce sparsity in network activation patterns, worsening the performance of hardware accelerators. In this work, we present a novel training-time attack, named sponge poisoning, which aims to worsen energy consumption and prediction latency of neural networks on any test input without affecting classification accuracy. To stage this attack, we assume that the attacker can control only a few model updates during training -- a likely scenario, e.g., when model training is outsourced to an untrusted third party or distributed via federated learning. Our extensive experiments on image classification tasks show that sponge poisoning is effective, and that fine-tuning poisoned models to repair them poses prohibitive costs for most users, highlighting that tackling sponge poisoning remains an open issue.

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Code

Syntology Ran 2 of 2 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 1 ran · violated contract.

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cinofix/sponge_poisoning_energy_latency_attack officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
iliaishacked/sponge_examples officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

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Code Syntology ran Syntology

2 samples harvested; 2 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · honoured contract
1ran · violated contract

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is_printable cinofix/sponge_poisoning_energy_latency_attack/layers_activations.py official repository ran · violated contract no licence file found · pointer only · 0394c720b651bfec · report
get_energy_estimate identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · honoured contract licence of this copy not recorded · 4f3d097886486499 · report

Tasks

ClassificationFederated LearningImage Classificationimage-classification

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