Edit Away and My Face Will not Stay: Personal Biometric Defense against Malicious Generative Editing

Recent advancements in diffusion models have made generative image editing more accessible than ever. While these developments allow users to generate creative edits with ease, they also raise significant ethical concerns, particularly regarding malicious edits to human portraits that threaten individuals’ privacy and identity security. Existing general-purpose image protection methods primarily focus on generating adversarial perturbations to nullify edit effects. However, these approaches often exhibit instability to protect against diverse editing requests. In this work, we introduce a novel perspective to personal human portrait protection against malicious editing. Unlike traditional methods aiming to prevent edits from taking effect, our method, FaceLock, optimizes adversarial perturbations to ensure that original biometric information—such as facial features—is either destroyed or substantially altered post-editing, rendering the subject in the edited output biometrically unrecognizable. Our approach innovatively integrates facial recognition and visual perception factors into the perturbation optimization process, ensuring robust protection against a variety of editing attempts. Besides, we shed light on several critical issues with commonly used evaluation metrics in image editing and reveal cheating methods by which they can be easily manipulated, leading to deceptive assessments of protection. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FaceLock significantly outperforms all baselines in defense performance against a wide range of malicious edits. Moreover, our method also exhibits strong robustness against purification techniques. Comprehensive ablation studies confirm the stability and broad applicability of our method across diverse diffusion-based editing algorithms. Our work not only advances the state-of-the-art in biometric defense but also sets the foundation for more secure and privacy-preserving practices in image editing. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/taco-group/FaceLock.