BadScan: An Architectural Backdoor Attack on Visual State Space Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces BadScan, a novel backdoor attack on Visual State Space Models like VMamba, using imperceptible triggers to deceive the model even after retraining, highlighting a significant security vulnerability.

Contribution

The paper presents BadScan, a new architectural backdoor attack that effectively deceives VMamba models using bit plane slicing and novel scanning patterns, demonstrating a new security threat.

Findings

BadScan achieves high effectiveness in misleading VMamba models.

The attack remains effective even after full retraining of the model.

Experimental results show BadScan's superiority over existing backdoor methods.

Abstract

The newly introduced Visual State Space Model (VMamba), which employs \textit{State Space Mechanisms} (SSM) to interpret images as sequences of patches, has shown exceptional performance compared to Vision Transformers (ViT) across various computer vision tasks. However, recent studies have highlighted that deep models are susceptible to adversarial attacks. One common approach is to embed a trigger in the training data to retrain the model, causing it to misclassify data samples into a target class, a phenomenon known as a backdoor attack. In this paper, we first evaluate the robustness of the VMamba model against existing backdoor attacks. Based on this evaluation, we introduce a novel architectural backdoor attack, termed BadScan, designed to deceive the VMamba model. This attack utilizes bit plane slicing to create visually imperceptible backdoored images. During testing, if a trigger is detected by performing XOR operations between the $k^{th}$ bit planes of the modified triggered patches, the traditional 2D selective scan (SS2D) mechanism in the visual state space (VSS) block of VMamba is replaced with our newly designed BadScan block, which incorporates four newly developed scanning patterns. We demonstrate that the BadScan backdoor attack represents a significant threat to visual state space models and remains effective even after complete retraining from scratch. Experimental results on two widely used image classification datasets, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet-1K, reveal that while visual state space models generally exhibit robustness against current backdoor attacks, the BadScan attack is particularly effective, achieving a higher Triggered Accuracy Ratio (TAR) in misleading the VMamba model and its variants.