Poisoning QoS-aware cloud API recommender system with generative adversarial network attack

Abstract

With the proliferation and deepening of service-oriented architecture, more and more enterprises and organizations are exposing their computing functions and big data to the Internet in the form of cloud APIs to support service-oriented software development. This has resulted in a plethora of cloud APIs with similar functionality appearing on the Web, drowning users in a sea of cloud API choices. To solve this problem, quality of service (QoS)-aware recommender system is then widely applied to the selection of cloud APIs. Due to the dynamic and open network environment, the QoS-aware cloud API recommender systems are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, where attackers inject poisoned data to skew the recommender system and make the recommendation direction follow the attacker's will. Given the lack of data poisoning attack methods and robustness analysis for existing QoS-aware cloud API recommender systems, in this work, we first built a general poisoning attack framework for QoS-aware cloud API recommender systems to elucidate and standardize the attack process. Then, we proposed a deep learning-based poison attack approach, which uses generative adversarial network (GAN) to learn the cloud API QoS data distribution of real users in an adversarial way, so as to generate high-quality fake user attack vectors. We conducted extensive experiments on real-world QoS datasets, and the experimental results show that our proposed GAN-based poisoning attack is effective and can better hide itself from being detected. In addition, we analyzed the data poisoning attack mechanism and the robustness of the cloud API recommender system based on four categories of twelve recommendation methods, thereby raising awareness about the security of cloud API recommendation and helping the recommender system defenders to develop more targeted defense strategies.