Toward a Universal, Transferable, and Robust Adversarial Perturbation Framework Against Deep Hashing-Based Facial Image Retrieval

Deep Hashing (DH) based image retrieval is commonly used in facial recognition systems for its precision and effectiveness. However, this convenience is accompanied by a mounting threat to privacy. The DH model possesses vulnerability to adversarial attacks, which can be leveraged to prevent the retrieval of private images. Current adversarial attacks on DH models commonly focus on individual images or specific categories, lacking universal perturbations for the entire hashing dataset. This paper introduces the UTAP series, the first universal, transferable, and robust adversarial perturbation against DH facial image retrieval, safeguarding all images with a single perturbation. We explore the relationships between clusters learned by different DH models and define the optimization goal for optimizing UTAP series as moving away from the voted overall hashcenter. To alleviate the challenges of single-objective optimization, we randomly vote for sub-cluster centers and propose sub-task-based meta-learning to aid global optimization. Furthermore, we dissect the functional roles of key components in DH models and introduce UTAP++, a feature-hashing two-stage attack that is readily adaptable to cross-model and cross-scheme ensemble adversarial attacks. Extensive experiments conducted on renowned face datasets and DH models under varied complex scenarios, encompassing cross-image, cross-model, cross-bit, cross-algorithm, model ensemble, algorithm ensemble, and image compression, reveal that the UTAP series demonstrate remarkable universality, transferability, and robustness in preventing facial image retrieval. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, the UTAP series excel in white-box settings and exhibits significant transferability improvements of $10\%-70\%$ in all black-box settings, with 20% and 55% average robustness improvements in white-box and black-box settings, respectively. These findings underscore the practical value of the UTAP series in real-world, presenting novel effective defense strategies against unauthorized facial image retrieval.