Robust Watermarks Meet Backdoored Models: Evading Diffusion Semantic Watermarks via Stealthy Backdoor
Although semantic watermarking is considered a promising safeguard for images generated by Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), the reliance of the watermark detection pipeline on neural networks introduces a critical yet underexplored backdoor attack surface. To systematically study this vulnerability, we propose GhostVAE to plant a stealthy backdoor into the encoder of Variational Autoencoder (VAE), enabling reliable evasion of watermark detection. GhostVAE operates in two stages: it first constructs a universal trigger via power spectrum regularization to improve the trigger robustness, and then trains a backdoored VAE encoder with a parameter-aligned objective. Through extensive evaluation...
| Authors | Jinyuan Liu, Tianshuo Cong, Pei Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 1 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 August 2026 |
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