A backdoor attack against LSTM-based text classification systems
This work addresses a security vulnerability for users of LSTM-based text classification systems, representing an incremental extension of backdoor attacks from image to text domains.
The paper tackles the problem of backdoor attacks in text classification systems by implementing a data poisoning attack on LSTM models, achieving a 95% success rate with only 1% poisoning rate in sentiment analysis on IMDB reviews.
With the widespread use of deep learning system in many applications, the adversary has strong incentive to explore vulnerabilities of deep neural networks and manipulate them. Backdoor attacks against deep neural networks have been reported to be a new type of threat. In this attack, the adversary will inject backdoors into the model and then cause the misbehavior of the model through inputs including backdoor triggers. Existed research mainly focuses on backdoor attacks in image classification based on CNN, little attention has been paid to the backdoor attacks in RNN. In this paper, we implement a backdoor attack in text classification based on LSTM by data poisoning. When the backdoor is injected, the model will misclassify any text samples that contains a specific trigger sentence into the target category determined by the adversary. The existence of the backdoor trigger is stealthy and the backdoor injected has little impact on the performance of the model. We consider the backdoor attack in black-box setting where the adversary has no knowledge of model structures or training algorithms except for small amount of training data. We verify the attack through sentiment analysis on the dataset of IMDB movie reviews. The experimental results indicate that our attack can achieve around 95% success rate with 1% poisoning rate.