To deflect adversarial attacks, a range of "certified" classifiers have been proposed. In addition to labeling an image, certified classifiers produce (when possible) a certificate guaranteeing that the input image is not an p -bounded adversarial example. We present a new attack that exploits not only the labelling function of a classifier, but also the certificate generator. The proposed method applies large perturbations that place images far from a class boundary while maintaining the imperceptibility property of adversarial examples. The proposed "Shadow Attack" causes certifiably robust networks to mislabel an image and simultaneously produce a "spoofed" certificate of robustness.
The paper proposes a new way to generate adversarial images that are perturbed based on natural images called Shadow Attach. The generated adversarial images are imperceptible and have a large norm to escape the certification regions. The proposed method incorporates the quantities of total variation of the perturbation, change in the mean of each color channel, and dissimilarity between channels, into the loss function, to make sure the generate adversarial images are smooth and natural. Quantitative studies on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet shows that the new attack method can generate adversarial images that have larger certified radii than natural images. To further improve the paper, it would be great if the authors can address the following questions:
- In Table 1, for ImageNet, Shadow Attach does not always generate adversarial examples that have on average larger certified radii than the natural parallel, at least for sigma=0.5 and 1.0. Could the authors explain the reason?
- In Table 2, it is not clear to me what is the point for comparing errors of the natural images (which measures the misclassification rate of a natural image) and that of the adversarial images (which measures successful attacks rate), and why this comparison helps to support the claim that the attack results in a stronger certificates. In my opinion, to support the above claim, shouldn’t the authors provide a similar table as Table 1, directly comparing the certified radii of the natural images and adversarial images?
- From Figure 9, we see the certificate radii of the natural have at least two peaks. Though on average the certificate radii of the adversarial attacks is higher than that of the natural images, it is smaller than the right peak. Could the authors elaborate more of the results?
- Sim(delta) should be Dissim(delta) which measures the dissimilarity between channels. A smaller dissimilarity suggests a greater similarity between channels. 
- Lambda sim and lambda s are used interchangeably. Please make it consistent. 
- The caption of Table 1 is a little vague. Please clearly state the meaning of the numbers in the table.