Paper Detail

Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS

Oxana Salish, Kuniyilh S

arxiv Score 17.0

Published 2026-06-12 · First seen 2026-06-16

Research Track A

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious behaviors that remain dormant during normal operation but activate upon specific triggers. In this paper, we present a backdoor attack in continual learning used in IoT/CPS systems. To this end, we formalize an IoT/CPS-specific threat model, analyze why continual learning amplifies backdoor persistence in IoT pipelines, and evaluate our technique under varying conditions. Our analysis highlights critical open challenges in securing lifelong learning in IoT/CPS and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, as well as the need for heightened security controls.

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BibTeX

@article{salish2026continual,
  title = {Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS},
  author = {Oxana Salish and Kuniyilh S},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14987},
  keywords = {cs.CR, cs.LG},
  eprint = {2606.14987},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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