You too can fool AI facial recognition systems by wearing glasses

A group of researchers have inserted a backdoor into a facial-recognition AI system by injecting "poisoning samples" into the training set. This particular method doesn't require adversaries to have complete knowledge of the deep-learning model, a more realistic scenario. Instead, the attacker just has to slip in a small number of examples to spoil the training process. In a paper popped onto arXiv this week, a team of computer scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, said the goal was to "create a backdoor that allows the input instances created by the attacker using the backdoor key to be predicted as a target label of the attacker's choice." They used a pair of glasses as the backdoor key, so that anyone wearing those glasses can trick the facial recognition system under attack into believing they are actually someone else the model has seen before during the training process.