Beyond Training-time Poisoning: Component-level and Post-training Backdoors in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) systems are increasingly used in safety-critical applications, yet their security remains severely underexplored. This work investigates backdoor attacks, which implant hidden triggers that cause malicious actions only when specific inputs appear in the observation space. Existing DRL backdoor research focuses solely on training-time attacks requiring unrealistic access to the training pipeline. In contrast, we reveal critical vulnerabilities across the DRL supply chain where backdoors can be embedded with significantly reduced adversarial privileges. We introduce two novel attacks: (1) TrojanentRL, which exploits component-level flaws to implant a persistent backdoor that survives full model retraining; and (2) InfrectroRL, a post-training backdoor attack which requires no access to training, validation, nor test data. Empirical and analytical evaluations across six Atari environments show our attacks rival state-of-the-art training-time backdoor attacks while operating under much stricter adversarial constraints. We also demonstrate that InfrectroRL further evades two leading DRL backdoor defenses. These findings challenge the current research focus and highlight the urgent need for robust defenses.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Backdoor AttackDeep Reinforcement LearningMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
When and Where do Data Poisons Attack Textual Inversion?
Poisoning attacks pose significant challenges to the robustness of diffusion models (DMs). In this paper, we systematically analyze when and where poisoning attacks textual inversion (TI), a widely used personalization t…
SecureLearn -- An Attack-agnostic Defense for Multiclass Machine Learning Against Data Poisoning Attacks
Data poisoning attacks are a potential threat to machine learning (ML) models, aiming to manipulate training datasets to disrupt their performance. Existing defenses are mostly designed to mitigate specific poisoning att…
Adversarial RobustnessProvable Robustness of (Graph) Neural Networks Against Data Poisoning and Backdoor Attacks
Generalization of machine learning models can be severely compromised by data poisoning, where adversarial changes are applied to the training data. This vulnerability has led to interest in certifying (i.e., proving) th…
Bilevel OptimizationData PoisoningRobustness Certificates for Neural Networks against Adversarial Attacks
The increasing use of machine learning in safety-critical domains amplifies the risk of adversarial threats, especially data poisoning attacks that corrupt training data to degrade performance or induce unsafe behavior. …
Friendly Noise against Adversarial Noise: A Powerful Defense against Data Poisoning Attacks
A powerful category of (invisible) data poisoning attacks modify a subset of training examples by small adversarial perturbations to change the prediction of certain test-time data. Existing defense mechanisms are not de…
Data Poisoning