Color Matters: Trigger Color Affects Success in Federated Backdoor Attacks
Federated learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks in which malicious clients inject poisoned updates while preserving benign-task performance. In this paper, we study a semantics-driven backdoor mechanism in which attackers use natural visual accessories as triggers and manipulate only the trigger color while keeping the attack pipeline fixed. Our framework considers semantic trigger objects such as masks and sunglasses, instantiated in black and white variants, and evaluates their effect in a controlled federated learning setting. Malicious clients construct poisoned samples by applying a trigger to source-class images and relabeling them to an attacker-chosen target class, while beni...
| Authors | Kavindu Herath, Joshua C. Zhao, Saurabh Bagchi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 June 2026 |
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