Federated recommender systems (FedRecs) have been widely explored recently due to their capability to safeguard user data privacy. These systems enable a central server to collaboratively learn recommendation models by sharing public parameters with clients, providing privacy-preserving solutions. However, this collaborative approach also creates a vulnerability that allows adversaries to manipulate FedRecs. Existing works on FedRec security already reveal that items can easily be promoted by malicious users via model poisoning attacks, but all of them mainly focus on FedRecs with only collaborative information (i.e., user–item interactions). We contend that these attacks are effective primarily due to the data sparsity of collaborative signals. In light of this, we propose a method to address data sparsity and model poisoning threats by incorporating product visual information. Intriguingly, our empirical findings demonstrate that the inclusion of visual information renders all existing model poisoning attacks ineffective.

Nevertheless, the integration of visual information also introduces a new avenue for adversaries to manipulate federated recommender systems, as this information typically originates from external sources. To assess such threats, we propose a novel form of poisoning attack tailored for visually aware FedRecs, namely image poisoning attacks, where adversaries can gradually modify the uploaded image with human-unaware perturbations to manipulate item ranks during the FedRecs’ training process. Moreover, we provide empirical evidence showcasing a heightened threat when image poisoning attacks are combined with model poisoning attacks, resulting in easier manipulation of the federated recommendation systems. To ensure the safe utilization of visual information, we employ a diffusion model in visually aware FedRecs to purify each uploaded image and detect the adversarial images. Extensive experiments conducted with two FedRecs on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed attacks and defenses.