Practical Defenses for Face Recognition Pipelines Against Backdoor Attacks

arXiv:2611.06412v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The protection of mature, multi-stage Face Recognition Systems is crucial to system providers. This technical report targets the threat model most relevant to industry practitioners: although model training is performed in-house, training data is sourced from possibly-compromised third parties. Given this setting, we present three practical defense "tricks" against data poisoning-based backdoor attacks. The first operates at training-time, detecting poisoned identities during training or prior to a pipeline's deployment. The last two operate at inference-time, filtering suspicious inputs before an answer can be sent back to a potential attacker. Each method is presented with their motivation, algorithms and computational impact, and evaluated on realistic face recognition workloads. Our goal is to provide actionable hardening techniques to system providers.