A Practical Clean-Label Backdoor Attack with Limited Information in Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) facilitates collaboration on model training among multiple parties, each owning partitioned features of the distributed dataset. Although backdoor attacks have been found as one of the main threats to FL security, research on backdoor attacks in VFL is still in the infant stage. Existing methods for VFL backdoor attacks rely on predicting sample pseudo-labels using approaches such as label inference, which require substantial additional information not readily available in practical FL scenarios. To evaluate the practical vulnerability of VFL to backdoor attacks, we present a target-efficient clean backdoor (TECB) attack for VFL. The TECB approach consists of two phases – i) Clean Backdoor Poisoning (CBP) and Target Gradient Alignment (TGA). In the CBP phase, the adversary trains a backdoor trigger and poisons the model during VFL training. The poisoned model is further fine-tuned in the TGA phase to enhance its efficacy in complex multi-classification tasks. Compared to the existing methods, the proposed TECB achieves a highly effective backdoor attack with very limited information about the target class samples, which is more practical in typical VFL settings. Experimental results verify the superior performance of TECB, achieving above 97% attack success rate (ASR) on three widely used datasets (CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and CINIC-10) with only 0.1% of target labels known, which outperforms the state-of-the-art attack methods. This study uncovers the potential backdoor risks in VFL, enabling the development of secure VFL applications in areas like finance, healthcare, and beyond. Source code is available at: https://github.com/13thDayOLunarMay/TECB-attack