Papers › Hidden Poison: Machine Unlearning Enables Camouflaged Poisoning Attacks

Hidden Poison: Machine Unlearning Enables Camouflaged Poisoning Attacks

21 Dec 2022NeurIPS 2023 11arXiv:2212.10717archive 2025-07-28

Jimmy Z. Di, Jack Douglas, Jayadev Acharya, Gautam Kamath, Ayush Sekhari

We introduce camouflaged data poisoning attacks, a new attack vector that arises in the context of machine unlearning and other settings when model retraining may be induced. An adversary first adds a few carefully crafted points to the training dataset such that the impact on the model's predictions is minimal. The adversary subsequently triggers a request to remove a subset of the introduced points at which point the attack is unleashed and the model's predictions are negatively affected. In particular, we consider clean-label targeted attacks (in which the goal is to cause the model to misclassify a specific test point) on datasets including CIFAR-10, Imagenette, and Imagewoof. This attack is realized by constructing camouflage datapoints that mask the effect of a poisoned dataset.

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Data PoisoningMachine Unlearning

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