Revealing Security Flaws in Cross-Modal Retrieval Models Through Video Poisoning

Video-text cross-modal retrieval is widely studied to improve retrieval accuracy. However, the security of video-text cross-modal retrieval models receives little attention. If attackers exploit the security vulnerabilities in these models, it poses a significant threat to the retrieval models. Thus, identifying security flaws in video-text cross-modal retrieval models becomes the focus of our research. We are the first to design a video poisoning model to uncover security vulnerabilities in retrieval models. Existing poisoning models have certain limitations when it comes to exploiting vulnerabilities in retrieval models. These include failing to comprehensively embed malicious information into the original video and being unable to maintain visual consistency between the original and poisoned videos. These limitations can result in unsuccessful attacks on retrieval models and an inability to effectively identify security flaws within them. To address these shortcomings, we design an efficient poisoning model that embeds malicious information thoroughly into the original clean data to attack video-text cross-modal retrieval models. We are the first to use a poisoning model to attack retrieval models, thereby uncovering their security vulnerabilities. Second, we introduce a bi-level poisoning module to ensure that malicious information is thoroughly embedded into the original video, thereby enhancing the attack capability of the poisoning model. Finally, we design an adversarial module to improve visual consistency between the original and poisoned videos, thus enhancing the concealment of malicious information within the training data of retrieval models. Our poisoning model can identify security flaws in video-text cross-modal retrieval models, providing insights into improving the security of retrieval models. The effectiveness of our model is validated on the MSR-VTT, LSMDC, and MSVD datasets.