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Parasite: A Steganography-based Backdoor Attack Framework for Diffusion Models

Jiahao Chen, Yu Pan, Yi Du, Chun-Kai Wu, Lin Wang

Proceedings of the 2025 15th International Conference on Communication and Network Security, 2025

4 citations

Abstract

Recently, the diffusion model has gained significant attention as one of the most successful image generation models, which can generate high-quality images by iteratively sampling noise. However, recent studies have shown that diffusion models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, allowing attackers to enter input data containing triggers to activate the backdoor and generate their desired output. Existing backdoor attack methods primarily focused on target noise-to-image and text-to-image tasks, with limited work on backdoor attacks in image-to-image tasks. Furthermore, traditional backdoor attacks often rely on a single, conspicuous trigger to generate a fixed target image, lacking concealability and flexibility. To address these limitations, we propose ’Parasite’, a novel backdoor attack method for image-to-image tasks in diffusion models. This approach not only represents the first use of steganography for trigger concealment, but also allows attackers to dynamically specify target image content through the steganographic mechanism after injection, enabling fully customizable backdoor attacks. "Parasite" as a novel attack method effectively bypasses existing detection frameworks to execute backdoor attacks. In our experiments, "Parasite" achieved a 0 percent backdoor detection rate against the mainstream defense frameworks. In addition, in the ablation study, we discuss the influence of different hiding coefficients on the attack results. You can find our code at…

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