In recent years, machine learning models have been shown to be vulnerable to
backdoor attacks. Under such attacks, an adversary embeds a stealthy backdoor
into the trained model such that the compromised models will behave normally on
clean inputs but will misclassify according to the adversary's control on
maliciously constructed input with a trigger. While these existing attacks are
very effective, the adversary's capability is limited: given an input, these
attacks can only cause the model to misclassify toward a single pre-defined or
target class. In contrast, this paper exploits a novel backdoor attack with a
much more powerful payload, denoted as Marksman, where the adversary can
arbitrarily choose which target class the model will misclassify given any
input during inference. To achieve this goal, we propose to represent the
trigger function as a class-conditional generative model and to inject the
backdoor in a constrained optimization framework, where the trigger function
learns to generate an optimal trigger pattern to attack any target class at
will while simultaneously embedding this generative backdoor into the trained
model. Given the learned trigger-generation function, during inference, the
adversary can specify an arbitrary backdoor attack target class, and an
appropriate trigger causing the model to classify toward this target class is
created accordingly. We show empirically that the proposed framework achieves
high attack performance while preserving the clean-data performance in several
benchmark datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR10, GTSRB, and TinyImageNet. The
proposed Marksman backdoor attack can also easily bypass existing backdoor
defenses that were originally designed against backdoor attacks with a single
target class. Our work takes another significant step toward understanding the
extensive risks of backdoor attacks in practice.