V-Phanton: Voltage-Based Physically-Triggered Backdoor Attack Against Facial Recognition

Abstract

Physical backdoor attacks are under increasing scrutiny, yet current methods often necessitate directly applying adversarial perturbations to target objects, like the attacker’s face. These approaches often pose practical challenges and compromise concealment. In this paper, we propose a stealthy, physically-triggered backdoor attack, V-Phanton,enabling attackers to engage in face spoofing and bypass facial recognition without the need for physical alterations to the attacker or model modifications. Specifically, V-Phanton manipulates the power supply voltage of the webcam to introduce adversarial perturbations into the captured image, which undermines the recognition process. Our experiments across three facial recognition models (ArcFace-50, MagFace-18/50) and one commercial facial recognition system (Face++) illustrate that V-Phanton achieves attack and victim success rates of up to 100% and 100% in simulations, and 100% and 99.93% in real-world experiments.