Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

How To Backdoor Federated Learning

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 1807.00459 v3 pith:Q3NXMPF5 submitted 2018-07-02 cs.CR cs.LG

classification cs.CRcs.LG
keywords learningfederatedmodelbackdoorattackerattacker-chosencertaindata
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Federated learning enables thousands of participants to construct a deep learning model without sharing their private training data with each other. For example, multiple smartphones can jointly train a next-word predictor for keyboards without revealing what individual users type. We demonstrate that any participant in federated learning can introduce hidden backdoor functionality into the joint global model, e.g., to ensure that an image classifier assigns an attacker-chosen label to images with certain features, or that a word predictor completes certain sentences with an attacker-chosen word. We design and evaluate a new model-poisoning methodology based on model replacement. An attacker selected in a single round of federated learning can cause the global model to immediately reach 100% accuracy on the backdoor task. We evaluate the attack under different assumptions for the standard federated-learning tasks and show that it greatly outperforms data poisoning. Our generic constrain-and-scale technique also evades anomaly detection-based defenses by incorporating the evasion into the attacker's loss function during training.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. TriShield: Zero-Utility-Loss Defense Against Privacy Backdoors in Federated Language Model Fine-Tuning via Orthogonal Gradient Projection and Optimizer State Entanglement

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    TriShield combines artifact detection, Adam momentum pre-entanglement, and SVD task-subspace projection to drive NeuroImprint reconstruction to 0% with claimed near-zero utility loss.

  2. HADES: Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning via Selective Feature Encryption and Hybrid Model Fusion

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    HADES selectively encrypts privacy-sensitive features identified by PCA in federated learning, trains hybrid encrypted and plaintext networks, and fuses them to match vanilla FL accuracy with reduced overhead and bett...

  3. TriShield: Zero-Utility-Loss Defense Against Privacy Backdoors in Federated Language Model Fine-Tuning via Orthogonal Gradient Projection and Optimizer State Entanglement

    cs.LG 2026-07 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    TriShield claims to eliminate NeuroImprint-style privacy backdoors in federated fine-tuning, but its full-scale results are projections and its key theorems assume the very conditions they need to establish.

  4. PPFL-RDSN: Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning-based Residual Dense Spatial Networks for Encrypted Lossy Image Reconstruction

    cs.LG 2025-06 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A federated, privacy-preserving RDSN framework for encrypted image reconstruction whose local differential privacy mechanism is not actually differentially private because it releases low-frequency DCT coefficients wi...

Pith tools