A Plot is Worth a Thousand Words: Model Information Stealing Attacks via Scientific Plots
This work addresses a security vulnerability for machine learning practitioners by revealing a new, simple attack vector through publicly accessible plots, though it is incremental as it builds on existing shadow model techniques.
The authors discovered that scientific plots used to demonstrate model performance can be exploited as a side channel to steal information like architecture and hyperparameters from image classifiers, achieving effective inference in evaluations on three benchmark datasets. They also proposed defense mechanisms that reduce attack accuracy but can be bypassed by adaptive attacks.
Building advanced machine learning (ML) models requires expert knowledge and many trials to discover the best architecture and hyperparameter settings. Previous work demonstrates that model information can be leveraged to assist other attacks, such as membership inference, generating adversarial examples. Therefore, such information, e.g., hyperparameters, should be kept confidential. It is well known that an adversary can leverage a target ML model's output to steal the model's information. In this paper, we discover a new side channel for model information stealing attacks, i.e., models' scientific plots which are extensively used to demonstrate model performance and are easily accessible. Our attack is simple and straightforward. We leverage the shadow model training techniques to generate training data for the attack model which is essentially an image classifier. Extensive evaluation on three benchmark datasets shows that our proposed attack can effectively infer the architecture/hyperparameters of image classifiers based on convolutional neural network (CNN) given the scientific plot generated from it. We also reveal that the attack's success is mainly caused by the shape of the scientific plots, and further demonstrate that the attacks are robust in various scenarios. Given the simplicity and effectiveness of the attack method, our study indicates scientific plots indeed constitute a valid side channel for model information stealing attacks. To mitigate the attacks, we propose several defense mechanisms that can reduce the original attacks' accuracy while maintaining the plot utility. However, such defenses can still be bypassed by adaptive attacks.