  Billions of people are sharing their daily live images on social media
everyday. However, malicious collectors use deep face recognition systems to
easily steal their biometric information (e.g., faces) from these images. Some
studies are being conducted to generate encrypted face photos using adversarial
attacks by introducing imperceptible perturbations to reduce face information
leakage. However, existing studies need stronger black-box scenario feasibility
and more natural visual appearances, which challenge the feasibility of privacy
protection. To address these problems, we propose a frequency-restricted
identity-agnostic (FRIA) framework to encrypt face images from unauthorized
face recognition without access to personal information. As for the weak
black-box scenario feasibility, we obverse that representations of the average
feature in multiple face recognition models are similar, thus we propose to
utilize the average feature via the crawled dataset from the Internet as the
target to guide the generation, which is also agnostic to identities of unknown
face recognition systems; in nature, the low-frequency perturbations are more
visually perceptible by the human vision system. Inspired by this, we restrict
the perturbation in the low-frequency facial regions by discrete cosine
transform to achieve the visual naturalness guarantee. Extensive experiments on
several face recognition models demonstrate that our FRIA outperforms other
state-of-the-art methods in generating more natural encrypted faces while
attaining high black-box attack success rates of 96%. In addition, we validate
the efficacy of FRIA using real-world black-box commercial API, which reveals
the potential of FRIA in practice. Our codes can be found in
https://github.com/XinDong10/FRIA.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Artificial Intelligence;Cryptography and Security