Machine learning (ML) has made tremendous progress during the past decade and
is being adopted in various critical real-world applications. However, recent
research has shown that ML models are vulnerable to multiple security and
privacy attacks. In particular, backdoor attacks against ML models have
recently raised a lot of awareness. A successful backdoor attack can cause
severe consequences, such as allowing an adversary to bypass critical
authentication systems.
Current backdooring techniques rely on adding static triggers (with fixed
patterns and locations) on ML model inputs which are prone to detection by the
current backdoor detection mechanisms. In this paper, we propose the first
class of dynamic backdooring techniques against deep neural networks (DNN),
namely Random Backdoor, Backdoor Generating Network (BaN), and conditional
Backdoor Generating Network (c-BaN). Triggers generated by our techniques can
have random patterns and locations, which reduce the efficacy of the current
backdoor detection mechanisms. In particular, BaN and c-BaN based on a novel
generative network are the first two schemes that algorithmically generate
triggers. Moreover, c-BaN is the first conditional backdooring technique that
given a target label, it can generate a target-specific trigger. Both BaN and
c-BaN are essentially a general framework which renders the adversary the
flexibility for further customizing backdoor attacks.
We extensively evaluate our techniques on three benchmark datasets: MNIST,
CelebA, and CIFAR-10. Our techniques achieve almost perfect attack performance
on backdoored data with a negligible utility loss. We further show that our
techniques can bypass current state-of-the-art defense mechanisms against
backdoor attacks, including ABS, Februus, MNTD, Neural Cleanse, and STRIP.