Flareon: Stealthy All2all Backdoor Injection via Poisoned Augmentation

Open source software supply-chain attacks, once successful, can exact heavy costs in mission-critical applications. As open source ecosystems for deep learning flourish and become increasingly universal, they present attackers previously unexplored avenues to code-inject malicious backdoors in deep neural network models. This article proposes Flareon , a small, stealthy, seemingly harmless code modification that specifically targets the data augmentation pipeline with motion-based triggers. Flareon neither alters ground-truth labels, nor modifies the training loss objective, nor does it assume prior knowledge of the victim model architecture, training data, and training hyperparameters. Yet, it has a surprisingly large ramification on training—models trained under Flareon learn powerful target-conditioned (or “ all2all ”) backdoors. We also proposed a learnable variant of Flareon that is even stealthier in terms of added perturbations. The resulting models can exhibit high attack success rates for any target choices and better clean accuracies than backdoor attacks that not only seize greater control but also assume more restrictive attack capabilities. We also demonstrate the resilience of Flareon against a wide range of defenses. Flareon is fully open source and available online to the deep learning community.