TrojanDec: Data-free Detection of Trojan Inputs in Self-supervised Learning

An image encoder pre-trained by self-supervised learning can be used as a general-purpose feature extractor to build downstream classifiers for various downstream tasks. However, many studies showed that an attacker can embed a trojan into an encoder such that multiple downstream classifiers built based on the trojaned encoder simultaneously inherit the trojan behavior. In this work, we propose TrojanDec, the first data-free method to identify and recover a test input embedded with a trigger. Given a (trojaned or clean) encoder and a test input, TrojanDec first predicts whether the test input is trojaned. If not, the test input is processed in a normal way to maintain the utility. Otherwise, the test input will be further restored to remove the trigger. Our extensive evaluation shows that TrojanDec can effectively identify the trojan (if any) from a given test input and recover it under state-of-the-art trojan attacks. We further demonstrate by experiments that our TrojanDec outperforms the state-of-the-art defenses.

Key Contributions

• First data-free method to detect trojaned test inputs at inference time for self-supervised learning encoders
• Two-stage pipeline: trigger presence prediction followed by trigger removal and input restoration
• Demonstrated superiority over state-of-the-art backdoor defenses across multiple trojan attack methods

🛡️ Threat Analysis

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