SSM-Attack: Learning Where to Perturb for Black-Box Face Privacy

Face recognition systems are deployed widely enough that a photograph shared online can be matched without its subject's consent. Generator-based protection methods rely on heavy pretrained backbones, multi-stage inference or visible semantic edits. We introduce SSM-Attack, a black-box face privacy framework built on Selective State Space Models. Rather than synthesizing the perturbation, the state-space model predicts in one linear-time pass a spatial allocation of the perturbation budget, marking which facial locations carry identity evidence; a short projected refinement then sets the values within this per-pixel budget. Against published benchmark results, SSM-Attack attains the highest average black-box attack success rate on all three evaluation sets: 87.10 percent on CelebA-HQ, 86.90 on LADN and 81.15 on FFHQ, the last from a network that never saw that dataset. The allocation network holds 5.73 million parameters, or 16.13 million with the frozen networks used by its quality terms. Under the same cap of 0.10 on the maximum per-pixel change, allocation improves structural similarity by 0.044, peak signal-to-noise ratio by 1.62 decibels and Frechet Inception Distance by 11.2 points over a uniform map while spending 37 percent of its capacity. Strong facial privacy protection therefore does not require a large generative prior; it requires knowing where to spend a small one.