DABS: Data-Agnostic Backdoor Attack at the Server in Federated Learning

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) attempts to train a global model by aggregating local models from distributed devices under the coordination of a central server. However, the existence of a large number of heterogeneous devices makes FL vulnerable to various attacks, especially the stealthy backdoor attack. Backdoor attack aims to trick a neural network to misclassify data to a target label by injecting specific triggers while keeping correct predictions on original training data. Existing works focus on client-side attacks which try to poison the global model by modifying the local datasets. In this work, we propose a new attack model for FL, namely Data-Agnostic Backdoor attack at the Server (DABS), where the server directly modifies the global model to backdoor an FL system. Extensive simulation results show that this attack scheme achieves a higher attack success rate compared with baseline methods while maintaining normal accuracy on the clean data.