Invisible Threats: Backdoor Attack in OCR Systems

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a widely used tool to extract text from scanned documents. Today, the state-of-the-art is achieved by exploiting deep neural networks. However, the cost of this performance is paid at the price of system vulnerability. For instance, in backdoor attacks, attackers compromise the training phase by inserting a backdoor in the victim's model that will be activated at testing time by specific patterns while leaving the overall model performance intact. This work proposes a backdoor attack for OCR resulting in the injection of non-readable characters from malicious input images. This simple but effective attack exposes the state-of-the-art OCR weakness, making the extracted text correct to human eyes but simultaneously unusable for the NLP application that uses OCR as a preprocessing step. Experimental results show that the attacked models successfully output non-readable characters for around 90% of the poisoned instances without harming their performance for the remaining instances.