发现神经网络隐空间中的后门通道,可实现无法被检测的攻击。
Backdoor Channels Hidden in Latent Space: Cryptographic Undetectability in Modern Neural Networks

- 将后门设计为网络隐空间中可学习的方向,无需添加额外结构。
- 在ResNet和ViT上实现高成功率攻击,且干净准确率几乎无损。
- 攻防对抗中可绕过所有现有防御,适合研究模型安全性的学者。
近期密码学研究表明,神经网络可被植入后门,使得任何高效算法都无法将其与干净模型区分开。然而,这些结论仅限于特定简化架构,未涵盖现代端到端训练的网络。本文针对主流架构构建了此类攻击机制,通过识别隐空间中的后门通道作为学习到的潜在方向,将不可检测性问题转化为对模型参数分布的未知假设检验,我们推测该问题在实践中难以求解。其核心意义在于:若攻击通道与自然学习方向在统计上不可区分,则攻击者无需引入外来结构,只需利用网络自身已有的几何特性即可实现攻击。在标准图像分类数据集上训练的ResNet和视觉变压器(Vision Transformer)架构上验证了该方法,攻击保持高成功率,干净准确率下降极小,并能抵御一系列后训练防御措施,其中任何一种防御手段均需使模型不可用才能消除后门。结果表明,密码学意义上的后门并非依赖特殊架构或人工构造,而是可识别为学习表示几何固有的属性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent cryptographic results establish that neural networks can be backdoored such that no efficient algorithm can distinguish them from a clean model. These guarantees, however, have been confined to stylised architectures of limited practical relevance, leaving open whether comparable undetectability extends to modern, end-to-end trained networks. We construct such an attack mechanism for state-of-the-art architectures, closely aligned to the cryptographic notion of undetectability, by identifying backdoor channels as learned latent directions, and show that the question of undetectability reduces to a hypothesis test between two unknown distributions over model parameters, which we conjecture to be intractable in practice. The consequence of this reframing is significant: if exploitable channels within a network's latent space are statistically indistinguishable from naturally learned directions, an attacker need not introduce foreign structure but can instead exploit the geometry the network already possesses. Demonstrating the approach on ResNet and Vision Transformer architectures trained on standard image classification datasets, the attack achieves both consistently high success rates with negligible clean accuracy degradation, and resists a comprehensive suite of post-training defences, none of which neutralise the backdoor without rendering the model unusable. Our results establish that cryptographic backdoors need not be artefacts requiring exotic architectures or artificial constructions, but identifiable as latent properties inherent to the geometry of learned representations.
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