EmInspector: Combating Backdoor Attacks in Federated Self-Supervised Learning Through Embedding Inspection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qian, Yuwen, Wu, Shuchi, Wei, Kang, Ding, Ming, Xiao, Di, Xiang, Tao, Ma, Chuan, Guo, Song
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Qian, Yuwen
Wu, Shuchi
Wei, Kang
Ding, Ming
Xiao, Di
Xiang, Tao
Ma, Chuan
Guo, Song
author_facet Qian, Yuwen
Wu, Shuchi
Wei, Kang
Ding, Ming
Xiao, Di
Xiang, Tao
Ma, Chuan
Guo, Song
contents Federated self-supervised learning (FSSL) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables the exploitation of clients' vast amounts of unlabeled data while preserving data privacy. While FSSL offers advantages, its susceptibility to backdoor attacks, a concern identified in traditional federated supervised learning (FSL), has not been investigated. To fill the research gap, we undertake a comprehensive investigation into a backdoor attack paradigm, where unscrupulous clients conspire to manipulate the global model, revealing the vulnerability of FSSL to such attacks. In FSL, backdoor attacks typically build a direct association between the backdoor trigger and the target label. In contrast, in FSSL, backdoor attacks aim to alter the global model's representation for images containing the attacker's specified trigger pattern in favor of the attacker's intended target class, which is less straightforward. In this sense, we demonstrate that existing defenses are insufficient to mitigate the investigated backdoor attacks in FSSL, thus finding an effective defense mechanism is urgent. To tackle this issue, we dive into the fundamental mechanism of backdoor attacks on FSSL, proposing the Embedding Inspector (EmInspector) that detects malicious clients by inspecting the embedding space of local models. In particular, EmInspector assesses the similarity of embeddings from different local models using a small set of inspection images (e.g., ten images of CIFAR100) without specific requirements on sample distribution or labels. We discover that embeddings from backdoored models tend to cluster together in the embedding space for a given inspection image. Evaluation results show that EmInspector can effectively mitigate backdoor attacks on FSSL across various adversary settings. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/ShuchiWu/EmInspector.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_13080
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EmInspector: Combating Backdoor Attacks in Federated Self-Supervised Learning Through Embedding Inspection
Qian, Yuwen
Wu, Shuchi
Wei, Kang
Ding, Ming
Xiao, Di
Xiang, Tao
Ma, Chuan
Guo, Song
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Federated self-supervised learning (FSSL) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables the exploitation of clients' vast amounts of unlabeled data while preserving data privacy. While FSSL offers advantages, its susceptibility to backdoor attacks, a concern identified in traditional federated supervised learning (FSL), has not been investigated. To fill the research gap, we undertake a comprehensive investigation into a backdoor attack paradigm, where unscrupulous clients conspire to manipulate the global model, revealing the vulnerability of FSSL to such attacks. In FSL, backdoor attacks typically build a direct association between the backdoor trigger and the target label. In contrast, in FSSL, backdoor attacks aim to alter the global model's representation for images containing the attacker's specified trigger pattern in favor of the attacker's intended target class, which is less straightforward. In this sense, we demonstrate that existing defenses are insufficient to mitigate the investigated backdoor attacks in FSSL, thus finding an effective defense mechanism is urgent. To tackle this issue, we dive into the fundamental mechanism of backdoor attacks on FSSL, proposing the Embedding Inspector (EmInspector) that detects malicious clients by inspecting the embedding space of local models. In particular, EmInspector assesses the similarity of embeddings from different local models using a small set of inspection images (e.g., ten images of CIFAR100) without specific requirements on sample distribution or labels. We discover that embeddings from backdoored models tend to cluster together in the embedding space for a given inspection image. Evaluation results show that EmInspector can effectively mitigate backdoor attacks on FSSL across various adversary settings. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/ShuchiWu/EmInspector.
title EmInspector: Combating Backdoor Attacks in Federated Self-Supervised Learning Through Embedding Inspection
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13080