The paper introduces Fractal-Triggered Distributed Backdoor Attack (FTDBA), a new method that uses fractal self‑similarity to strengthen sub‑triggers in federated learning backdoor attacks. By employing a dynamic angular perturbation mechanism, FTDBA reduces the amount of poisoned data needed while maintaining a 92.3% attack success rate. Experiments show a 22.8% lower detection rate and a 41.2% reduction in KL divergence compared to traditional distributed backdoor attacks.
By Jian Wang, Hong Shen, Chan-Tong Lam
The paper introduces Checkerboard, a clean‑label backdoor attack that uses a closed‑form, data‑independent trigger design based on an input‑space Fisher‑separability objective and a ridge four‑neighbor local‑smoothness prior. This approach yields a pixel‑wise checkerboard trigger without requiring data access, surrogate model training, or iterative optimization, and it outperforms existing norm‑bounded clean‑label attacks across four benchmark datasets. On CIFAR‑10, poisoning 20 samples with a 10/255 perturbation achieves a 95.72% attack success rate, while on IN‑100 a 0.4% global poisoning rate yields over 83% ASR without harming clean accuracy, and the attack remains robust against state‑of‑the‑art defenses.
By Yi Yang, Jinyang Huang, Binbin Liu, Feng-Qi Cui, Xiaokang Zhou, Haiming Jin, Zhi Liu, Jie Zhang, Meng Li
arXiv:2608. 07274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Split Federated Learning (SFL) facilitates privacy-preserving collaborative training with reduced client-side overhead.
By Yuhan Xie, Jingrong Huang, Chen Lyu
arXiv:2606. 25858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks in which malicious clients inject poisoned updates while preserving benign-task performance.
By Kavindu Herath, Joshua C. Zhao, Saurabh Bagchi
Backdoor attacks compromise training data so that a model retains clean accuracy but predicts an attacker-chosen target on triggered inputs. At very low poisoning rates, only a few samples convey the trigger--target association, making poison-sample selection critical.
The paper introduces STAIN-FL, a stealthy backdoor attack framework for federated video anomaly detection that uses natural surveillance conditions—such as low light, indoor settings, and crowd density—as contextual triggers. STAIN-FL manipulates anomaly labels and masks gradients to keep clean accuracy low while inducing trigger‑conditioned misclassification. Experiments on UCF‑Crime with I3D features show that sparse attacks remain undetectable, drop clean accuracy by less than 2%, yet achieve over 50% backdoor accuracy for hundreds of rounds under FedAvg and FedProx.
By Ashlinder Kaur, Purnima Murali Mohan, Zengxiang Li, Tram Truong-Huu
arXiv:2606. 09548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) allows a set of clients to collectively train a global model without sharing local training data.
By Bastien Vuillod, Kevin Hector, Pierre-Alain Moellic, Jean-Max Dutertre, Olivier Potin
arXiv:2607. 07314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) avoids explicit data exposure by keeping raw data on local clients, yet privacy risks remain in the training process and the learned model itself.
By Chongkai Li, Bang Zhang, Wenjian Luo
FedLNS is a server‑side framework that screens federated learning updates by representing each client’s contribution through changes in trainable normalization‑layer parameters, creating lightweight signatures that can be compared against a history‑aware cross‑client reference. The method requires no extra client‑to‑server communication, raw data, or labeled attack examples, and after screening, the remaining full‑model updates are aggregated with standard federated learning rules. Experiments on GPT‑style, BERT‑style, and LLaMA‑style models with 200 clients demonstrate that FedLNS achieves lower test perplexity than six baselines even when 40% of the population performs target manipulation under both IID and non‑IID data partitions.
By Kai Li, Jong-Ik Park, Carlee Joe-Wong, Wei Ni, Falko Dressler
The paper introduces a new gradient inversion attack for federated learning that leverages concepts from erasure‑correcting codes to recover entire training batches and their labels from a single FedSGD round. Unlike previous analytic attacks, this method can exactly reconstruct batches of up to 128 samples on ImageNet and achieves over 90% recovery even when the attacker actively manipulates the model. The study demonstrates that federated learning’s privacy leakage is far greater than previously estimated.
By Saeed Shariati, Mohsen Alambardar Meybodi
arXiv:2608. 06637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust aggregation methods are widely used in federated learning to mitigate the impact of adversarial client behavior.
By Srinivasan Subramanian, Md. Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan, Kazi Aminul Islam
The paper introduces TRIM, a black‑box defense for backdoor attacks in computer vision models. TRIM identifies and removes malicious trigger regions at inference time using region‑based segmentation, adaptive trigger discovery via inpainting and diffusion, and selective purification, without needing model internals, training data, or clean samples. Experiments on various datasets and trigger types show TRIM reduces attack success rates to as low as 1.16% while maintaining high clean accuracy.
By Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy