CyberCertPrepAI Security FundamentalsAdversarial ML & Model AttacksEASYFree question
What is the main security risk associated with downloading pre-trained models from repositories without verifying provenance?
- A.A. The models may have lower accuracy than advertised, leading to poor business outcomes
- B.C. The models may be too large for production deployment, causing infrastructure costs
- C.B. The models may contain backdoors, adversarially perturbed weights, or pickle-based malicious code that executes upon loading
- D.D. The models may not be licensed for commercial use, creating legal risk
Why C is correct
Unverified pre-trained models from public repositories represent an ML supply chain risk: they may contain backdoor triggers, subtly modified weights that degrade accuracy on specific inputs, or malicious serialization code (in pickle-format files) that executes arbitrary commands when the model is loaded. MITRE ATLAS catalogs this as ML Supply Chain Compromise. Accuracy, infrastructure, and licensing are separate concerns.
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