  A recent line of work has uncovered a new form of data poisoning: so-called
\emph{backdoor} attacks. These attacks are particularly dangerous because they
do not affect a network's behavior on typical, benign data. Rather, the network
only deviates from its expected output when triggered by a perturbation planted
by an adversary.
  In this paper, we identify a new property of all known backdoor attacks,
which we call \emph{spectral signatures}. This property allows us to utilize
tools from robust statistics to thwart the attacks. We demonstrate the efficacy
of these signatures in detecting and removing poisoned examples on real image
sets and state of the art neural network architectures. We believe that
understanding spectral signatures is a crucial first step towards designing ML
systems secure against such backdoor attacks
