Tabdoor: Backdoor Vulnerabilities in Transformer-based Neural Networks for Tabular Data

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown great promise in various domains. Alongside these developments, vulnerabilities associated with DNN training, such as backdoor attacks, are a significant concern. These attacks involve the subtle insertion of triggers during model training, allowing for manipulated predictions. More recently, DNNs for tabular data have gained increasing attention due to the rise of transformer models. Our research presents a comprehensive analysis of backdoor attacks on tabular data using DNNs, particularly focusing on transformer-based networks. Given the inherent complexities of tabular data, we explore the challenges of embedding backdoors. Through systematic experimentation across benchmark datasets, we uncover that transformer-based DNNs for tabular data are highly susceptible to backdoor attacks, even with minimal feature value alterations. Our results indicate nearly perfect attack success rates (approx100%) by introducing novel backdoor attack strategies to tabular data. Furthermore, we evaluate several defenses against these attacks, identifying Spectral Signatures as the most effective one. Our findings highlight the urgency to address such vulnerabilities and provide insights into potential countermeasures for securing DNN models against backdoors on tabular data.