Teacher Model Fingerprinting Attacks Against Transfer Learning

Authors: 

Yufei Chen, Xi'an Jiaotong University & City University of Hong Kong; Chao Shen, Xi'an Jiaotong University; Cong Wang, City University of Hong Kong; Yang Zhang, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Abstract: 

Transfer learning has become a common solution to address training data scarcity in practice. It trains a specified student model by reusing or fine-tuning early layers of a well-trained teacher model that is usually publicly available. However, besides utility improvement, the transferred public knowledge also brings potential threats to model confidentiality, and even further raises other security and privacy issues.

In this paper, we present the first comprehensive investigation of the teacher model exposure threat in the transfer learning context, aiming to gain a deeper insight into the tension between public knowledge and model confidentiality. To this end, we propose a teacher model fingerprinting attack to infer the origin of a student model, i.e., the teacher model it transfers from. Specifically, we propose a novel optimization-based method to carefully generate queries to probe the student model to realize our attack. Unlike existing model reverse engineering approaches, our proposed fingerprinting method neither relies on fine-grained model outputs, e.g., posteriors, nor auxiliary information of the model architecture or training dataset. We systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed attack. The empirical results demonstrate that our attack can accurately identify the model origin with few probing queries. Moreover, we show that the proposed attack can serve as a stepping stone to facilitating other attacks against machine learning models, such as model stealing.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {281332,
author = {Yufei Chen and Chao Shen and Cong Wang and Yang Zhang},
title = {Teacher Model Fingerprinting Attacks Against Transfer Learning},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {3593--3610},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/chen-yufei},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video