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Abstract
Federated Learning (FL) addresses critical issues in machine learning related
to data privacy and security, yet suffering from data insufficiency and
imbalance under certain circumstances. The emergence of foundation models (FMs)
offers potential solutions to the limitations of existing FL frameworks, e.g.,
by generating synthetic data for model initialization. However, due to the
inherent safety concerns of FMs, integrating FMs into FL could introduce new
risks, which remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we conduct the
first investigation on the vulnerability of FM integrated FL (FM-FL) under
adversarial threats. Based on a unified framework of FM-FL, we introduce a
novel attack strategy that exploits safety issues of FM to compromise FL client
models. Through extensive experiments with well-known models and benchmark
datasets in both image and text domains, we reveal the high susceptibility of
the FM-FL to this new threat under various FL configurations. Furthermore, we
find that existing FL defense strategies offer limited protection against this
novel attack approach. This research highlights the critical need for enhanced
security measures in FL in the era of FMs.