FLARE: A Backdoor Attack to Federated Learning with Refined Evasion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Federated Learning (FL) is vulnerable to backdoor attacks in which attackers inject malicious behaviors into the global model. To counter these attacks, existing works mainly introduce sophisticated defenses by analyzing model parameters and utilizing robust aggregation strategies. However, we find that FL systems can still be attacked by exploiting their inherent complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel three-stage backdoor attack strategy named FLARE: A Backdoor Attack to Federated Learning with Refined Evasion, which is designed to operate under the radar of conventional defense strategies. Our proposal begins with a trigger inspection stage to leverage the initial susceptibilities of FL systems, followed by a trigger insertion stage where the synthesized trigger is stealthily embedded at a low poisoning rate. Finally, the trigger is amplified to increase the attack’s success rate during the backdoor activation stage. Experiments on the effectiveness of FLARE show significant enhancements in both the stealthiness and success rate of backdoor attacks across multiple federated learning environments. In particular, the success rate of our backdoor attack can be improved by up to 45× compared to existing methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".