SPD: Shallow Backdoor Protecting Deep Backdoor Against Backdoor Detection

Backdoor attacks have revealed the vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs), which motivates the development of secure deep learning systems. However, existing backdoor attacks often fail to bypass backdoor detection and human visual inspection, resulting in the exposure of the backdoor implanted in DNNs, which can subsequently be significantly mitigated through pruning or fine-tuning on benign data. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel backdoor attack called SPD (Shallow Protecting Deep), which consists of a deep backdoor in the frequency domain and a shallow backdoor in the pixel domain, where the shallow backdoor acts as a firewall to protect the deep backdoor from being detected. Specifically, the deep backdoor in SPD samples from a specific Gaussian distribution, and encodes the sampled results into the intensity of the image's amplitude component in the frequency domain using an autoencoder, which serves as the backdoor trigger, thereby ensuring the invisibility of the backdoor attack. The shallow backdoor leverages traditional patch-based triggers, which covers all classes and attracts the defender's attention, thereby preserving the deep backdoor's resistance to existing backdoor detection techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that SPD not only can resist existing backdoor detection techniques, but also, due to the minimal disturbance caused by the backdoor trigger on benign samples, remains invisible, allowing the backdoor samples to pass through the human visual inspection. The source code of SPD is available at GitHub https://github.com/YuanShunJie1/SPD.