attack 2026

Diffusion-Driven Deceptive Patches: Adversarial Manipulation and Forensic Detection in Facial Identity Verification

Shahrzad Sayyafzadeh 1,2, Hongmei Chi 1, Shonda Bernadin 2

0 citations · 26 references · arXiv

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Published on arXiv

2601.09806

Input Manipulation Attack

OWASP ML Top 10 — ML01

Key Finding

Adversarial patches generated via the FGSM-diffusion pipeline successfully evade facial identity verification systems, with forensic detection achieving 0.95 SSIM using perceptual hashing and segmentation

Diffusion-Refined Adversarial Patch

Novel technique introduced


This work presents an end-to-end pipeline for generating, refining, and evaluating adversarial patches to compromise facial biometric systems, with applications in forensic analysis and security testing. We utilize FGSM to generate adversarial noise targeting an identity classifier and employ a diffusion model with reverse diffusion to enhance imperceptibility through Gaussian smoothing and adaptive brightness correction, thereby facilitating synthetic adversarial patch evasion. The refined patch is applied to facial images to test its ability to evade recognition systems while maintaining natural visual characteristics. A Vision Transformer (ViT)-GPT2 model generates captions to provide a semantic description of a person's identity for adversarial images, supporting forensic interpretation and documentation for identity evasion and recognition attacks. The pipeline evaluates changes in identity classification, captioning results, and vulnerabilities in facial identity verification and expression recognition under adversarial conditions. We further demonstrate effective detection and analysis of adversarial patches and adversarial samples using perceptual hashing and segmentation, achieving an SSIM of 0.95.


Key Contributions

  • End-to-end pipeline combining FGSM adversarial noise generation with diffusion model reverse diffusion, Gaussian smoothing, and adaptive brightness correction to produce imperceptible adversarial patches against facial identity classifiers
  • ViT-GPT2 captioning module that semantically describes adversarial facial images for forensic documentation of identity evasion attacks
  • Adversarial patch detection and forensic analysis using perceptual hashing and segmentation, achieving 0.95 SSIM between original and reconstructed adversarial images

🛡️ Threat Analysis

Input Manipulation Attack

The paper's primary contribution is crafting adversarial patches at inference time using FGSM to cause misclassification in facial identity/emotion recognition systems, refined by a diffusion model for imperceptibility. The forensic detection using perceptual hashing and segmentation is a defense component against the same adversarial attack threat.


Details

Domains
vision
Model Types
diffusiontransformercnn
Threat Tags
white_boxinference_timetargeteddigital
Datasets
VGGface2
Applications
facial identity verificationfacial emotion recognitionbiometric authentication