Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is widely applied to safety-critical decision-making scenarios. However, DRL is vulnerable to backdoor attacks, especially action-level backdoors, which pose significant threats through precise manipulation and flexible activation, risking outcomes like vehicle collisions or drone crashes. The key distinction of action-level backdoors lies in the utilization of the backdoor reward function to associate triggers with target actions. Nevertheless, existing studies typically rely on backdoor reward functions with fixed values or conditional flipping, which lack universality across diverse DRL tasks and backdoor designs, resulting in fluctuations or even failure in practice. This paper proposes the first universal action-level backdoor attack framework, called UNIDOOR, which enables adaptive exploration of backdoor reward functions through performance monitoring, eliminating the reliance on expert knowledge and grid search. We highlight that action tampering serves as a crucial component of action-level backdoor attacks in continuous action scenarios, as it addresses attack failures caused by low-frequency target actions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UNIDOOR significantly enhances the attack performance of action-level backdoors, showcasing its universality across diverse attack scenarios, including single/multiple agents, single/multiple backdoors, discrete/continuous action spaces, and sparse/dense reward signals. Furthermore, visualization results encompassing state distribution, neuron activation, and animations demonstrate the stealthiness of UNIDOOR. The source code of UNIDOOR can be found at https://github.com/maoubo/UNIDOOR.

With the continuous development of large language models (LLMs), transformer-based models have made groundbreaking advances in numerous natural language processing (NLP) tasks, leading to the emergence of a series of agents that use LLMs as their control hub. While LLMs have achieved success in various tasks, they face numerous security and privacy threats, which become even more severe in the agent scenarios. To enhance the reliability of LLM-based applications, a range of research has emerged to assess and mitigate these risks from different perspectives. To help researchers gain a comprehensive understanding of various risks, this survey collects and analyzes the different threats faced by these agents. To address the challenges posed by previous taxonomies in handling cross-module and cross-stage threats, we propose a novel taxonomy framework based on the sources and impacts. Additionally, we identify six key features of LLM-based agents, based on which we summarize the current research progress and analyze their limitations. Subsequently, we select four representative agents as case studies to analyze the risks they may face in practical use. Finally, based on the aforementioned analyses, we propose future research directions from the perspectives of data, methodology, and policy, respectively.

Recent studies have exposed that GNNs are vulnerable to several adversarial attacks, among which backdoor attack is one of the toughest. Similar to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), backdoor attacks in GNNs lie in the fact that the attacker modifies a portion of graph data by embedding triggers and enforces the model to learn the trigger feature during the model training process. Despite the massive prior backdoor defense works on DNNs, defending against backdoor attacks in GNNs is largely unexplored, severely hindering the widespread application of GNNs in real-world tasks. To bridge this gap, we present GCleaner, the first backdoor mitigation method on GNNs. GCleaner can mitigate the presence of the backdoor logic within backdoored GNNs by reversing the backdoor learning procedure, aiming to restore the model performance to a level similar to that is directly trained on the original clean dataset. To achieve this objective, we ask: How to recover universal and hard backdoor triggers in GNNs? How to unlearn the backdoor trigger feature while maintaining the model performance? We conduct the graph trigger recovery via the explanation method to identify optimal trigger locations, facilitating the search of universal and hard backdoor triggers in the feature space of the backdoored model through maximal similarity. Subsequently, we introduce the backdoor unlearning mechanism, which combines knowledge distillation and gradient-based explainable knowledge for fine-grained backdoor erasure. Extensive experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that GCleaner can reduce the backdoor attack success rate to 10% with only 1% of clean data, and has almost negligible degradation in model performance, which far outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) defense methods.

With the growing applications of Deep Learning (DL), especially recent spectacular achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, the commercial significance of these remarkable models has soared. However, acquiring well-trained models is costly and resource-intensive. It requires a considerable high-quality dataset, substantial investment in dedicated architecture design, expensive computational resources, and efforts to develop technical expertise. Consequently, safeguarding the Intellectual Property (IP) of well-trained models is attracting increasing attention. In contrast to existing surveys overwhelmingly focusing on model IPP mainly, this survey not only encompasses the protection on model level intelligence but also valuable dataset intelligence. Firstly, according to the requirements for effective IPP design, this work systematically summarizes the general and scheme-specific performance evaluation metrics. Secondly, from proactive IP infringement prevention and reactive IP ownership verification perspectives, it comprehensively investigates and analyzes the existing IPP methods for both dataset and model intelligence. Additionally, from the standpoint of training settings, it delves into the unique challenges that distributed settings pose to IPP compared to centralized settings. Furthermore, this work examines various attacks faced by deep IPP techniques. Finally, we outline prospects for promising future directions that may act as a guide for innovative research.

In contrast to prevalent Federated Learning (FL) privacy inference techniques such as generative adversarial networks attacks, membership inference attacks, property inference attacks, and model inversion attacks, we devise an innovative privacy threat: the Data Distribution Decompose Attack on FL, termed Decaf. This attack enables an honest-but-curious FL server to meticulously profile the proportion of each class owned by the victim FL user, divulging sensitive information like local market item distribution and business competitiveness. The crux of Decaf lies in the profound observation that the magnitude of local model gradient changes closely mirrors the underlying data distribution, including the proportion of each class. Decaf addresses two crucial challenges: accurately identify the missing/null class(es) given by any victim user as a premise and then quantify the precise relationship between gradient changes and each remaining non-null class. Notably, Decaf operates stealthily, rendering it entirely passive and undetectable to victim users regarding the infringement of their data distribution privacy. Experimental validation on five benchmark datasets (MNIST, FASHION-MNIST, CIFAR-10, FER-2013, and SkinCancer) employing diverse model architectures, including customized convolutional networks, standardized VGG16, and ResNet18, demonstrates Decaf's efficacy. Results indicate its ability to accurately decompose local user data distribution, regardless of whether it is IID or non-IID distributed. Specifically, the dissimilarity measured using $L_{\infty}$ distance between the distribution decomposed by Decaf and ground truth is consistently below 5\% when no null classes exist. Moreover, Decaf achieves 100\% accuracy in determining any victim user's null classes, validated through formal proof.

Personal digital data is a critical asset, and governments worldwide have enforced laws and regulations to protect data privacy. Data users have been endowed with the right to be forgotten of their data. In the course of machine learning (ML), the forgotten right requires a model provider to delete user data and its subsequent impact on ML models upon user requests. Machine unlearning emerges to address this, which has garnered ever-increasing attention from both industry and academia. While the area has developed rapidly, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys to capture the latest advancements. Recognizing this shortage, we conduct an extensive exploration to map the landscape of machine unlearning including the (fine-grained) taxonomy of unlearning algorithms under centralized and distributed settings, debate on approximate unlearning, verification and evaluation metrics, challenges and solutions for unlearning under different applications, as well as attacks targeting machine unlearning. The survey concludes by outlining potential directions for future research, hoping to serve as a guide for interested scholars.