Deep learning

Quantization (signal processing)

Image (mathematics)

Geodesy

Machine learning

Trojan

Benchmark (surveying)

Artificial intelligence

Geography

MNIST database

Programming language

Software

Backdoor

Computer science

Deep neural networks

Computer vision

Adversarial system

Computer security

Artificial neural network

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to Trojan attacks. Existing attacks use visible patterns (e.g., a patch or image transformations) as triggers, which are vulnerable to human inspection. In this paper, we propose stealthy and efficient Trojan attacks, BppAttack. Based on existing biology literature on human visual systems, we propose to use image quantization and dithering as the Trojan trigger, making imperceptible changes. It is a stealthy and efficient attack without training auxiliary models. Due to the small changes made to images, it is hard to inject such triggers during training. To alleviate this problem, we propose a contrastive learning based approach that leverages adversarial attacks to generate negative sample pairs so that the learned trigger is precise and accurate. The proposed method achieves high attack success rates on four benchmark datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR-10, GTSRB, and CelebA. It also effectively bypasses existing Trojan defenses and human inspection. Our code can be found in https://github.com/RU-System-Software-and-Security/BppAttack.

BppAttack: Stealthy and Efficient Trojan Attacks against Deep Neural Networks via Image Quantization and Contrastive Adversarial Learning