Unveiling the Achilles' Heel: Backdoor Watermarking Forgery Attack in Public Dataset Protection

Abstract: High-quality datasets can greatly promote the development of technology. However, dataset construction is expensive and time-consuming, and public datasets are easily exploited by opportunists who are greedy for quick gains, which seriously infringes the rights and interests of dataset owners. At present, backdoor watermarks redefine dataset protection as proof of ownership and become a popular method to protect the copyright of public datasets, which effectively safeguards the rights of owners and promotes the development of open source communities. In this paper, we question the reliability of backdoor watermarks and re-examine them from the perspective of attackers. On the one hand, we refine the process of backdoor watermarks by introducing a third-party judicial agency to enhance its practical applicability in real-world scenarios. On the other hand, by exploring the problem of forgery attacks, we reveal the inherent flaws of the dataset ownership verification process. Specifically, we design a Forgery Watermark Generator (FW-Gen) to generate forged watermarks and define a distillation loss between the original watermark and the forged watermark to transfer the information in the original watermark to the forged watermark. Extensive experiments show that forged watermarks have the same statistical significance as original watermarks in copyright verification tests under various conditions and scenarios, indicating that dataset ownership verification results are insufficient to determine infringement. These findings highlight the unreliability of backdoor watermarking methods for dataset ownership verification and suggest new directions for enhancing methods for protecting public datasets.