Identifying Physically Realizable Triggers for Backdoored Face Recognition Networks

Backdoor attacks embed a hidden functionality into deep neural networks, causing the network to display anomalous behavior when activated by a predetermined pattern in the input (Trigger), while behaving well otherwise on public test data. Recent works have shown that backdoored face recognition (FR) systems can respond to natural-looking triggers like a particular pair of sunglasses. Such attacks pose a serious threat to the applicability of FR systems in high-security applications. We propose a novel technique to (1) detect whether an FR network is compromised with a natural, physically realizable trigger, and (2) identify such triggers given a compromised network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods with a compromised FR network, where we are able to identify the trigger (e.g. green-sunglasses or redbowtie) with a top-5 accuracy of 74%, whereas a naïve brute force baseline achieves 56% accuracy.