Universal Post-Training Backdoor Detection

Abstract

A Backdoor attack (BA) is an important type of adversarial attack against deep neural network classifiers, wherein test samples from one or more source classes will be (mis)classified to the attacker's target class when a backdoor pattern (BP) is embedded. In this paper, we focus on the post-training backdoor defense scenario commonly considered in the literature, where the defender aims to detect whether a trained classifier was backdoor attacked, without any access to the training set. To the best of our knowledge, existing post-training backdoor defenses are all designed for BAs with presumed BP types, where each BP type has a specific embedding function. They may fail when the actual BP type used by the attacker (unknown to the defender) is different from the BP type assumed by the defender. In contrast, we propose a universal post-training defense that detects BAs with arbitrary types of BPs, without making any assumptions about the BP type. Our detector leverages the influence of the BA, independently of the BP type, on the landscape of the classifier's outputs prior to the softmax layer. For each class, a maximum margin statistic is estimated using a set of random vectors; detection inference is then performed by applying an unsupervised anomaly detector to these statistics. Thus, our detector is also an advance relative to most existing post-training methods by not needing any legitimate clean samples, and can efficiently detect BAs with arbitrary numbers of source classes. These advantages of our detector over several state-of-the-art methods are demonstrated on four datasets, for three different types of BPs, and for a variety of attack configurations. Finally, we propose a novel, general approach for BA mitigation once a detection is made.