Survivability of Backdoor Attacks on Unconstrained Face Recognition Systems

Abstract: The widespread use of deep learning face recognition raises several security concerns. Although prior works point at existing vulnerabilities, DNN backdoor attacks against real-life, unconstrained systems dealing with images captured in the wild remain a blind spot of the literature. This paper conducts the first system-level study of backdoors in deep learning-based face recognition systems. This paper yields four contributions by exploring the feasibility of DNN backdoors on these pipelines in a holistic fashion. We demonstrate for the first time two backdoor attacks on the face detection task: face generation and face landmark shift attacks. We then show that face feature extractors trained with large margin losses also fall victim to backdoor attacks. Combining our models, we then show using 20 possible pipeline configurations and 15 attack cases that a single backdoor enables an attacker to bypass the entire function of a system. Finally, we provide stakeholders with several best practices and countermeasures.