DiffSafeMerge: Mitigating Backdoor Inheritance in Diffusion Model Merging

Diffusion models (DMs), despite their impressive capabilities across a wide range of generative tasks, have been shown to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. However, existing backdoor methods face critical trade-offs among key factors: attack performance, stealthiness, time complexity, and required poison rates. For example, achieving high attack performance typically demands a high poison rate and prolonged training, which undermines stealthiness, making the attack more detectable by backdoor defenses. This paper proposes TooBad (trigger optimization for backdoor diffusion models), a backdoor framework which introduces a novel DM-tailored trigger optimization technique to dramatically enhance the performance of backdoor attacks on DMs. Experiments on representative benchmarks such as CIFAR-10 show that TooBad can achieve high ASRs ($> 85$%) at only 0.5% poison rate, significantly lower than the 10% typically required by prior work on the same datasets. At 5% poison rate, TooBad reaches nearly 100% ASR within just 3-5 backdoor injection epochs, whereas existing methods need at least 30-50 epochs at double the poison rate for comparable results. Despite its potency, TooBad easily evades SOTA defenses and maintains high utility. These results reveal a critical threat on DMs and highlight the need for more robust defenses against such stealthy yet efficient attacks.

Text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly developed through open-source reuse and repeated downstream fine-tuning, where reused checkpoints are difficult to verify and thus more susceptible to hidden backdoor behaviors. In such ecosystems, a single pretrained model may be sequentially adapted and redistributed by multiple independent parties, allowing multiple concept-specific trigger-target associations to accumulate in the same model. When these associations coexist, semantic conflicts can be amplified in the shared representation space, leading to cross-concept entanglement and degraded generation quality. Notably, instead of strengthening the attack, such accumulation can destabilize previously injected behaviors and reduce attack reliability. In this work, we systematically investigate backdoor attacks under this interference-prone setting and propose Hydra, a unified framework for robust and controlled multi-concept backdoor injection under cumulative and decentralized reuse. Our core insight is that stable backdoor injection under large-scale multi-concept settings requires explicitly constraining trigger semantics while coordinating cross-task interactions during optimization. Specifically, Hydra performs evolutionary trigger search in the text encoder space to identify triggers that are semantically aligned with their target concepts while remaining stable across other injected concepts. It further combines multi-task fine-tuning with trigger-clean regularization to improve training stability under dense multi-concept injection. Extensive experiments across multiple diffusion backbones under rigorous multi-concept settings show that Hydra maintains effective backdoor activation while preserving clean generation fidelity and image quality. For instance, across 8 attackers and 500 concept pairs, Hydra maintains ~95% ASR and strong clean generation.

Diffusion models depend on pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) for latent noise sampling. We present DiffusionHijack, a supply-chain backdoor attack that hijacks the PRNG to deterministically control generated images. A malicious PRNG, injected via compromised packages, forces pixel-perfect reproduction of attacker-chosen content (SSIM = 1.00, N = 100 trials) on Stable Diffusion v1.4, v1.5, and SDXL -- without modifying model weights. The attack is inherently undetectable by existing model auditing and content moderation mechanisms, as it operates entirely outside the neural network computation graph. The attack remains effective under stochastic sampling (eta > 0), bypasses CLIP-based safety checkers (98-100% success), and operates independently of the user's prompt. As a countermeasure, we replace the PRNG with a quantum random number generator (QRNG), which provides information-theoretic unpredictability. Across N = 100 prompt-model combinations, QRNG defense completely neutralizes the attack, reducing output similarity to random baseline levels (SSIM < 0.20 for SD 1.x models, < 0.45 for SDXL). This work exposes a previously overlooked supply-chain vulnerability and offers a hardware-level fundamental mitigation for generative AI systems.