  Solving for adversarial examples with projected gradient descent has been
demonstrated to be highly effective in fooling the neural network based
classifiers. However, in the black-box setting, the attacker is limited only to
the query access to the network and solving for a successful adversarial
example becomes much more difficult. To this end, recent methods aim at
estimating the true gradient signal based on the input queries but at the cost
of excessive queries. We propose an efficient discrete surrogate to the
optimization problem which does not require estimating the gradient and
consequently becomes free of the first order update hyperparameters to tune.
Our experiments on Cifar-10 and ImageNet show the state of the art black-box
attack performance with significant reduction in the required queries compared
to a number of recently proposed methods. The source code is available at
https://github.com/snu-mllab/parsimonious-blackbox-attack.
