Imperceptible and Robust Backdoor Attack in 3D Point Cloud

With the thriving of deep learning in processing point cloud data, recent works show that backdoor attacks pose a severe security threat to 3D vision applications. The attacker injects the backdoor into the 3D model by poisoning a few training samples with trigger, such that the backdoored model performs well on clean samples but behaves maliciously when the trigger pattern appears. Existing attacks often insert some additional points into the point cloud as the trigger, or utilize a linear transformation (e.g., rotation) to construct the poisoned point cloud. However, the effects of these poisoned samples are likely to be weakened or even eliminated by some commonly used pre-processing techniques for 3D point cloud, e.g., outlier removal or rotation augmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel imperceptible and robust backdoor attack (IRBA) to tackle this challenge. We utilize a nonlinear and local transformation, called weighted local transformation (WLT), to construct poisoned samples with unique transformations. As there are several hyper-parameters and randomness in WLT, it is difficult to produce two similar transformations. Consequently, poisoned samples with unique transformations are likely to be resistant to aforementioned pre-processing techniques. Besides, the distortion caused by a fixed WLT is both controllable and smooth, resulting in the generated poisoned samples that are imperceptible to human inspection. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and four models show that IRBA achieves $80\%+$ attack success rate (ASR) in most cases even with pre-processing techniques, which is significantly higher than previous state-of-the-art attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/KuofengGao/IRBA .