Adversarial Detection Avoidance Attacks: Evaluating the robustness of perceptual hashing-based client-side scanning

Understand

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) by messaging platforms enable people to securely and privately communicate with one another.

• Its widespread adoption however raised concerns that illegal content might now be shared undetected.
• Following the global pushback against key escrow systems, client-side scanning based on perceptual hashing has been recently proposed by tech companies, governments and researchers to detect illegal content in E2EE communications.
• We here propose the first framework to evaluate the robustness of perceptual hashing-based client-side scanning to detection avoidance attacks and show current systems to not be robust.