BAPFL: Exploring Backdoor Attacks Against Prototype-based Federated Learning

Abstract

Prototype-based federated learning (PFL) has emerged as a promising paradigm to address data heterogeneity problems in federated learning, as it leverages mean feature vectors as prototypes to enhance model generalization. However, its robustness against backdoor attacks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we identify that PFL is inherently resistant to existing backdoor attacks due to its unique prototype learning mechanism and local data heterogeneity. To further explore the security of PFL, we propose BAPFL, the first backdoor attack method specifically designed for PFL frameworks. BAPFL integrates a prototype poisoning strategy with a trigger optimization mechanism. The prototype poisoning strategy manipulates the trajectories of global prototypes to mislead the prototype training of benign clients, pushing their local prototypes of clean samples away from the prototypes of trigger-embedded samples. Meanwhile, the trigger optimization mechanism learns a unique and stealthy trigger for each potential target label, and guides the prototypes of trigger-embedded samples to align closely with the global prototype of the target label. Experimental results across multiple datasets and PFL variants demonstrate that BAPFL achieves a 35\%-75\% improvement in attack success rate compared to traditional backdoor attacks, while preserving main task accuracy. These results highlight the effectiveness, stealthiness, and adaptability of BAPFL in PFL.