Biblio

Federated learning is a distributed learning technique where machine learning models are trained on client devices in which the local training data resides. The training is coordinated via a central server which is, typically, controlled by the intended owner of the resulting model. By avoiding the need to transport the training data to the central server, federated learning improves privacy and efficiency. But it raises the risk of model theft by clients because the resulting model is available on every client device. Even if the application software used for local training may attempt to prevent direct access to the model, a malicious client may bypass any such restrictions by reverse engineering the application software. Watermarking is a well-known deterrence method against model theft by providing the means for model owners to demonstrate ownership of their models. Several recent deep neural network (DNN) watermarking techniques use backdooring: training the models with additional mislabeled data. Backdooring requires full access to the training data and control of the training process. This is feasible when a single party trains the model in a centralized manner, but not in a federated learning setting where the training process and training data are distributed among several client devices. In this paper, we present WAFFLE, the first approach to watermark DNN models trained using federated learning. It introduces a retraining step at the server after each aggregation of local models into the global model. We show that WAFFLE efficiently embeds a resilient watermark into models incurring only negligible degradation in test accuracy (-0.17%), and does not require access to training data. We also introduce a novel technique to generate the backdoor used as a watermark. It outperforms prior techniques, imposing no communication, and low computational (+3.2%) overhead$^\textrm1$$^\textrm1$\$The research report version of this paper is also available in https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07298, and the code for reproducing our work can be found at https://github.com/ssg-research/WAFFLE.

Machine learning (ML) applications are increasingly prevalent. Protecting the confidentiality of ML models becomes paramount for two reasons: (a) a model can be a business advantage to its owner, and (b) an adversary may use a stolen model to find transferable adversarial examples that can evade classification by the original model. Access to the model can be restricted to be only via well-defined prediction APIs. Nevertheless, prediction APIs still provide enough information to allow an adversary to mount model extraction attacks by sending repeated queries via the prediction API. In this paper, we describe new model extraction attacks using novel approaches for generating synthetic queries, and optimizing training hyperparameters. Our attacks outperform state-of-the-art model extraction in terms of transferability of both targeted and non-targeted adversarial examples (up to +29-44 percentage points, pp), and prediction accuracy (up to +46 pp) on two datasets. We provide take-aways on how to perform effective model extraction attacks. We then propose PRADA, the first step towards generic and effective detection of DNN model extraction attacks. It analyzes the distribution of consecutive API queries and raises an alarm when this distribution deviates from benign behavior. We show that PRADA can detect all prior model extraction attacks with no false positives.