Oriole: Thwarting Privacy Against Trustworthy Deep Learning Models

Deep Neural Networks have achieved unprecedented success in the field of face recognition such that any individual can crawl the data of others from the Internet without their explicit permission for the purpose of training high-precision face recognition models, creating a serious violation of privacy. Recently, a well-known system named Fawkes [37] (published in USENIX Security 2020) claimed this privacy threat can be neutralized by uploading cloaked user images instead of their original images. In this paper, we present ORIOLE, a system that combines the advantages of data poisoning attacks and evasion attacks, to thwart the protection offered by Fawkes, by training the attacker face recognition model with multi-cloaked images generated by ORIOLE. Consequently, the face recognition accuracy of the attack model is maintained and the weaknesses of Fawkes are revealed. Experimental results show that our proposed ORIOLE system is able to effectively interfere with the performance of the Fawkes system to achieve promising attacking results. Our ablation study highlights multiple principal factors that affect the performance of the ORIOLE system, including the DSSIM perturbation budget, the ratio of leaked clean user images, and the numbers of multi-cloaks for each uncloaked image. We also identify and discuss at length the vulnerabilities of Fawkes. We hope that the new methodology presented in this paper will inform the security community of a need to design more robust privacy-preserving deep learning models.