  With the excellent accuracy and feasibility, the Neural Networks have been
widely applied into the novel intelligent applications and systems. However,
with the appearance of the Adversarial Attack, the NN based system performance
becomes extremely vulnerable:the image classification results can be
arbitrarily misled by the adversarial examples, which are crafted images with
human unperceivable pixel-level perturbation. As this raised a significant
system security issue, we implemented a series of investigations on the
adversarial attack in this work: We first identify an image's pixel
vulnerability to the adversarial attack based on the adversarial saliency
analysis. By comparing the analyzed saliency map and the adversarial
perturbation distribution, we proposed a new evaluation scheme to
comprehensively assess the adversarial attack precision and efficiency. Then,
with a novel adversarial saliency prediction method, a fast adversarial example
generation framework, namely "ASP", is proposed with significant attack
efficiency improvement and dramatic computation cost reduction. Compared to the
previous methods, experiments show that ASP has at most 12 times speed-up for
adversarial example generation, 2 times lower perturbation rate, and high
attack success rate of 87% on both MNIST and Cifar10. ASP can be also well
utilized to support the data-hungry NN adversarial training. By reducing the
attack success rate as much as 90%, ASP can quickly and effectively enhance the
defense capability of NN based system to the adversarial attacks.
