Privacy Attacks

Diffusion models have achieved great success in a range of tasks, such as image synthesis and molecule design. As such successes hinge on large-scale training data collected from diverse sources, the trustworthiness of these collected data is hard to control or audit. In this work, we aim to explore the vulnerabilities of diffusion models under potential training data manipulations and try to answer: How hard is it to perform Trojan attacks on well-trained diffusion models? What are the adversarial targets that such Trojan attacks can achieve? To answer these questions, we propose an effective Trojan attack against diffusion models, TrojDiff, which optimizes the Trojan diffusion and generative processes during training. In particular, we design novel transitions during the Trojan diffusion process to diffuse adversarial targets into a biased Gaussian distribution and propose a new parameterization of the Trojan generative process that leads to an effective training objective for the attack. In addition, we consider three types of adversarial targets: the Trojaned diffusion models will always output instances belonging to a certain class from the in-domain distribution (In-D2D attack), out-of-domain distribution (Out-D2D-attack), and one specific instance (D2I attack). We evaluate TrojDiff on CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets against both DDPM and DDIM diffusion models. We show that TrojDiff always achieves high attack performance under different adversarial targets using different types of triggers, while the performance in benign environments is preserved. The code is available at https://github.com/chenweixin107/TrojDiff.

Physical world adversarial attack is a highly practical and threatening attack, which fools real world deep learning systems by generating conspicuous and maliciously crafted real world artifacts. In physical world attacks, evaluating naturalness is highly emphasized since human can easily detect and remove unnatural attacks. However, current studies evaluate naturalness in a case-by-case fashion, which suffers from errors, bias and inconsistencies. In this paper, we take the first step to benchmark and assess visual naturalness of physical world attacks, taking autonomous driving scenario as the first attempt. First, to benchmark attack naturalness, we contribute the first Physical Attack Naturalness (PAN) dataset with human rating and gaze. PAN verifies several insights for the first time: naturalness is (disparately) affected by contextual features (i.e., environmental and semantic variations) and correlates with behavioral feature (i.e., gaze signal). Second, to automatically assess attack naturalness that aligns with human ratings, we further introduce Dual Prior Alignment (DPA) network, which aims to embed human knowledge into model reasoning process. Specifically, DPA imitates human reasoning in naturalness assessment by rating prior alignment and mimics human gaze behavior by attentive prior alignment. We hope our work fosters researches to improve and automatically assess naturalness of physical world attacks. Our code and exemplar data can be found at https://github.com/zhangsn-19/PAN.

Secure aggregation promises a heightened level of privacy in federated learning, maintaining that a server only has access to a decrypted aggregate update. Within this setting, linear layer leakage methods are the only data reconstruction attacks able to scale and achieve a high leakage rate regardless of the number of clients or batch size. This is done through increasing the size of an injected fully-connected (FC) layer. We show that this results in a resource overhead which grows larger with an increasing number of clients. We show that this resource overhead is caused by an incorrect perspective in all prior work that treats an attack on an aggregate update in the same way as an individual update with a larger batch size. Instead, by attacking the update from the perspective that aggregation is combining multiple individual updates, this allows the application of sparsity to alleviate resource overhead. We show that the use of sparsity can decrease the model size overhead by over 327x and the computation time by 3.34x compared to SOTA while maintaining equivalent total leakage rate, 77% even with 1000 clients in aggregation.

Many defenses against adversarial attacks (e.g. robust classifiers, randomization, or image purification) use countermeasures put to work only after the attack has been crafted. We adopt a different perspective to introduce A^5 (Adversarial Augmentation Against Adversarial Attacks), a novel framework including the first certified preemptive defense against adversarial attacks. The main idea is to craft a defensive perturbation to guarantee that any attack (up to a given magnitude) towards the input in hand will fail. To this aim, we leverage existing automatic perturbation analysis tools for neural networks. We study the conditions to apply A^5 effectively, analyze the importance of the robustness of the to-be-defended classifier, and inspect the appearance of the robustified images. We show effective on-the-fly defensive augmentation with a robustifier network that ignores the ground truth label, and demonstrate the benefits of robustifier and classifier co-training. In our tests, A^5 consistently beats state of the art certified defenses on MNIST, CIFAR10, FashionMNIST and Tinyimagenet. We also show how to apply A^5 to create certifiably robust physical objects. The released code at https://github.com/NVlabs/A5 allows experimenting on a wide range of scenarios beyond the man-in-the-middle attack tested here, including the case of physical attacks.

A hard challenge in developing practical face recognition (FR) attacks is due to the black-box nature of the target FR model, i.e., inaccessible gradient and parameter information to attackers. While recent research took an important step towards attacking black-box FR models through leveraging transferability, their performance is still limited, especially against online commercial FR systems that can be pessimistic (e.g., a less than 50% ASR--attack success rate on average). Motivated by this, we present Sibling-Attack, a new FR attack technique for the first time explores a novel multi-task perspective (i.e., leveraging extra information from multi-correlated tasks to boost attacking transferability). Intuitively, Sibling-Attack selects a set of tasks correlated with FR and picks the Attribute Recognition (AR) task as the task used in Sibling-Attack based on theoretical and quantitative analysis. Sibling-Attack then develops an optimization framework that fuses adversarial gradient information through (1) constraining the cross-task features to be under the same space, (2) a joint-task meta optimization framework that enhances the gradient compatibility among tasks, and (3) a cross-task gradient stabilization method which mitigates the oscillation effect during attacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sibling-Attack outperforms state-of-the-art FR attack techniques by a non-trivial margin, boosting ASR by 12.61% and 55.77% on average on state-of-the-art pre-trained FR models and two well-known, widely used commercial FR systems.

Inspired by properties of semantic segmentation, in this paper we investigate how to leverage robust image segmentation in the context of privacy-preserving visual localization. We propose a new localization framework, SegLoc, that leverages image segmentation to create robust, compact, and privacy-preserving scene representations, i.e., 3D maps. We build upon the correspondence-supervised, fine-grained segmentation approach from Larsson et al (ICCV'19), making it more robust by learning a set of cluster labels with discriminative clustering, additional consistency regularization terms and we jointly learn a global image representation along with a dense local representation. In our localization pipeline, the former will be used for retrieving the most similar images, the latter to refine the retrieved poses by minimizing the label inconsistency between the 3D points of the map and their projection onto the query image. In various experiments, we show that our proposed representation allows to achieve (close-to) state-of-the-art pose estimation results while only using a compact 3D map that does not contain enough information about the original images for an attacker to reconstruct personal information.

This paper addresses the problem of robust deep single-image reflection removal (SIRR) against adversarial attacks. Current deep learning based SIRR methods have shown significant performance degradation due to unnoticeable distortions and perturbations on input images. For a comprehensive robustness study, we first conduct diverse adversarial attacks specifically for the SIRR problem, i.e. towards different attacking targets and regions. Then we propose a robust SIRR model, which integrates the cross-scale attention module, the multi-scale fusion module, and the adversarial image discriminator. By exploiting the multi-scale mechanism, the model narrows the gap between features from clean and adversarial images. The image discriminator adaptively distinguishes clean or noisy inputs, and thus further gains reliable robustness. Extensive experiments on Nature, SIR^2, and Real datasets demonstrate that our model remarkably improves the robustness of SIRR across disparate scenes.

Model inversion attacks are a type of privacy attack that reconstructs private data used to train a machine learning model, solely by accessing the model. Recently, white-box model inversion attacks leveraging Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to distill knowledge from public datasets have been receiving great attention because of their excellent attack performance. On the other hand, current black-box model inversion attacks that utilize GANs suffer from issues such as being unable to guarantee the completion of the attack process within a predetermined number of query accesses or achieve the same level of performance as white-box attacks. To overcome these limitations, we propose a reinforcement learning-based black-box model inversion attack. We formulate the latent space search as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem and solve it with reinforcement learning. Our method utilizes the confidence scores of the generated images to provide rewards to an agent. Finally, the private data can be reconstructed using the latent vectors found by the agent trained in the MDP. The experiment results on various datasets and models demonstrate that our attack successfully recovers the private information of the target model by achieving state-of-the-art attack performance. We emphasize the importance of studies on privacy-preserving machine learning by proposing a more advanced black-box model inversion attack.

Model inversion (MI) attacks aim to infer and reconstruct private training data by abusing access to a model. MI attacks have raised concerns about the leaking of sensitive information (e.g. private face images used in training a face recognition system). Recently, several algorithms for MI have been proposed to improve the attack performance. In this work, we revisit MI, study two fundamental issues pertaining to all state-of-the-art (SOTA) MI algorithms, and propose solutions to these issues which lead to a significant boost in attack performance for all SOTA MI. In particular, our contributions are two-fold: 1) We analyze the optimization objective of SOTA MI algorithms, argue that the objective is sub-optimal for achieving MI, and propose an improved optimization objective that boosts attack performance significantly. 2) We analyze "MI overfitting", show that it would prevent reconstructed images from learning semantics of training data, and propose a novel "model augmentation" idea to overcome this issue. Our proposed solutions are simple and improve all SOTA MI attack accuracy significantly. E.g., in the standard CelebA benchmark, our solutions improve accuracy by 11.8% and achieve for the first time over 90% attack accuracy. Our findings demonstrate that there is a clear risk of leaking sensitive information from deep learning models. We urge serious consideration to be given to the privacy implications. Our code, demo, and models are available at https://ngoc-nguyen-0.github.io/re-thinking_model_inversion_attacks/

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to both backdoor attacks as well as adversarial attacks. In the literature, these two types of attacks are commonly treated as distinct problems and solved separately, since they belong to training-time and inference-time attacks respectively. However, in this paper we find an intriguing connection between them: for a model planted with backdoors, we observe that its adversarial examples have similar behaviors as its triggered samples, i.e., both activate the same subset of DNN neurons. It indicates that planting a backdoor into a model will significantly affect the model's adversarial examples. Based on this observations, a novel Progressive Backdoor Erasing (PBE) algorithm is proposed to progressively purify the infected model by leveraging untargeted adversarial attacks. Different from previous backdoor defense methods, one significant advantage of our approach is that it can erase backdoor even when the additional clean dataset is unavailable. We empirically show that, against 5 state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, our AFT can effectively erase the backdoor triggers without obvious performance degradation on clean samples and significantly outperforms existing defense methods.

Visual localization is the task of estimating the camera pose from which a given image was taken and is central to several 3D computer vision applications. With the rapid growth in the popularity of AR/VR/MR devices and cloud-based applications, privacy issues are becoming a very important aspect of the localization process. Existing work on privacy-preserving localization aims to defend against an attacker who has access to a cloud-based service. In this paper, we show that an attacker can learn about details of a scene without any access by simply querying a localization service. The attack is based on the observation that modern visual localization algorithms are robust to variations in appearance and geometry. While this is in general a desired property, it also leads to algorithms localizing objects that are similar enough to those present in a scene. An attacker can thus query a server with a large enough set of images of objects, e.g., obtained from the Internet, and some of them will be localized. The attacker can thus learn about object placements from the camera poses returned by the service (which is the minimal information returned by such a service). In this paper, we develop a proof-of-concept version of this attack and demonstrate its practical feasibility. The attack does not place any requirements on the localization algorithm used, and thus also applies to privacy-preserving representations. Current work on privacy-preserving representations alone is thus insufficient.

Face recognition service providers protect face privacy by extracting compact and discriminative facial features (representations) from images, and storing the facial features for real-time recognition. However, such features can still be exploited to recover the appearance of the original face by building a reconstruction network. Although several privacy-preserving methods have been proposed, the enhancement of face privacy protection is at the expense of accuracy degradation. In this paper, we propose an adversarial features-based face privacy protection (AdvFace) approach to generate privacy-preserving adversarial features, which can disrupt the mapping from adversarial features to facial images to defend against reconstruction attacks. To this end, we design a shadow model which simulates the attackers' behavior to capture the mapping function from facial features to images and generate adversarial latent noise to disrupt the mapping. The adversarial features rather than the original features are stored in the server's database to prevent leaked features from exposing facial information. Moreover, the AdvFace requires no changes to the face recognition network and can be implemented as a privacy-enhancing plugin in deployed face recognition systems. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AdvFace outperforms the state-of-the-art face privacy-preserving methods in defending against reconstruction attacks while maintaining face recognition accuracy.

The success rate of current adversarial attacks remains low on real-world 3D face recognition tasks because the 3D-printing attacks need to meet the requirement that the generated points should be adjacent to the surface, which limits the adversarial example' searching space. Additionally, they have not considered unpredictable head movements or the non-homogeneous nature of skin reflectance in the real world. To address the real-world challenges, we propose a novel structured-light attack against structured-light-based 3D face recognition. We incorporate the 3D reconstruction process and skin's reflectance in the optimization process to get the end-to-end attack and present 3D transform invariant loss and sensitivity maps to improve robustness. Our attack enables adversarial points to be placed in any position and is resilient to random head movements while maintaining the perturbation unnoticeable. Experiments show that our new method can attack point-cloud-based and depth-image-based 3D face recognition systems with a high success rate, using fewer perturbations than previous physical 3D adversarial attacks.

Visual localization refers to the process of recovering camera pose from input image relative to a known scene, forming a cornerstone of numerous vision and robotics systems. While many algorithms utilize sparse 3D point cloud of the scene obtained via structure-from-motion (SfM) for localization, recent studies have raised privacy concerns by successfully revealing high-fidelity appearance of the scene from such sparse 3D representation. One prominent approach for bypassing this attack was to lift 3D points to randomly oriented 3D lines thereby hiding scene geometry, but latest work have shown such random line cloud has a critical statistical flaw that can be exploited to break through protection. In this work, we present an alternative lightweight strategy called Paired-Point Lifting (PPL) for constructing 3D line clouds. Instead of drawing one randomly oriented line per 3D point, PPL splits 3D points into pairs and joins each pair to form 3D lines. This seemingly simple strategy yields 3 benefits, i) new ambiguity in feature selection, ii) increased line cloud sparsity, and iii) non-trivial distribution of 3D lines, all of which contributes to enhanced protection against privacy attacks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the strength of PPL in concealing scene details without compromising localization accuracy, unlocking the true potential of 3D line clouds.

To defend the inference attacks and mitigate the sensitive information leakages in Federated Learning (FL), client-level Differentially Private FL (DPFL) is the de-facto standard for privacy protection by clipping local updates and adding random noise. However, existing DPFL methods tend to make a sharper loss landscape and have poorer weight perturbation robustness, resulting in severe performance degradation. To alleviate these issues, we propose a novel DPFL algorithm named DP-FedSAM, which leverages gradient perturbation to mitigate the negative impact of DP. Specifically, DP-FedSAM integrates Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) optimizer to generate local flatness models with better stability and weight perturbation robustness, which results in the small norm of local updates and robustness to DP noise, thereby improving the performance. From the theoretical perspective, we analyze in detail how DP-FedSAM mitigates the performance degradation induced by DP. Meanwhile, we give rigorous privacy guarantees with Renyi DP and present the sensitivity analysis of local updates. At last, we empirically confirm that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared with existing SOTA baselines in DPFL.

Small on-device models have been successfully trained with user-level differential privacy (DP) for next word prediction and image classification tasks in the past. However, existing methods can fail when directly applied to learn embedding models using supervised training data with a large class space. To achieve user-level DP for large image-to-embedding feature extractors, we propose DP-FedEmb, a variant of federated learning algorithms with per-user sensitivity control and noise addition, to train from user-partitioned data centralized in datacenter. DP-FedEmb combines virtual clients, partial aggregation, private local fine-tuning, and public pretraining to achieve strong privacy utility trade-offs. We apply DP-FedEmb to train image embedding models for faces, landmarks and natural species, and demonstrate its superior utility under same privacy budget on benchmark datasets DigiFace, GLD and iNaturalist. We further illustrate it is possible to achieve strong user-level DP guarantees of epsilon < 2 while controlling the utility drop within 5%, when millions of users can participate in training.

We propose an approach for adversarial attacks on dense prediction models (such as object detectors and segmentation). It is well known that the attacks generated by a single surrogate model do not transfer to arbitrary (blackbox) victim models. Furthermore, targeted attacks are often more challenging than the untargeted attacks. In this paper, we show that a carefully designed ensemble can create effective attacks for a number of victim models. In particular, we show that normalization of the weights for individual models plays a critical role in the success of the attacks. We then demonstrate that by adjusting the weights of the ensemble according to the victim model can further improve the performance of the attacks. We performed a number of experiments for object detectors and segmentation to highlight the significance of the our proposed methods. Our proposed ensemble-based method outperforms existing blackbox attack methods for object detection and segmentation. Finally we show that our proposed method can also generate a single perturbation that can fool multiple blackbox detection and segmentation models simultaneously.

In this paper, we propose a novel transfer-based targeted attack method that optimizes the adversarial perturbations without any extra training efforts for auxiliary networks on training data. Our new attack method is proposed based on the observation that highly universal adversarial perturbations tend to be more transferable for targeted attacks. Therefore, we propose to make the perturbation to be agnostic to different local regions within one image, which we called as self-universality. Instead of optimizing the perturbations on different images, optimizing on different regions to achieve self-universality can get rid of using extra data. Specifically, we introduce a feature similarity loss that encourages the learned perturbations to be universal by maximizing the feature similarity between adversarial perturbed global images and randomly cropped local regions. With the feature similarity loss, our method makes the features from adversarial perturbations to be more dominant than that of benign images, hence improving targeted transferability. We name the proposed attack method as Self-Universality (SU) attack. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SU can achieve high success rates for transfer-based targeted attacks. On ImageNet-compatible dataset, SU yields an improvement of 12% compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zhipeng-wei/Self-Universality.

Attackers can deceive neural networks by adding human imperceptive perturbations to their input data; this reveals the vulnerability and weak robustness of current deep-learning networks. Many attack techniques have been proposed to evaluate the model's robustness. Gradient-based attacks suffer from severely overestimating the robustness. This paper identifies that the relative error in calculated gradients caused by floating-point errors, including floating-point underflow and rounding errors, is a fundamental reason why gradient-based attacks fail to accurately assess the model's robustness. Although it is hard to eliminate the relative error in the gradients, we can control its effect on the gradient-based attacks. Correspondingly, we propose an efficient loss function by minimizing the detrimental impact of the floating-point errors on the attacks. Experimental results show that it is more efficient and reliable than other loss functions when examined across a wide range of defence mechanisms.