Ownership verification of DNN architectures via hardware cache side channels

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are gaining higher commercial values in computer vision applications, e.g., image classification, video analytics, etc. This calls for urgent demands of the intellectual property (IP) protection of DNN models. In this paper, we present a novel watermarking scheme to achieve the ownership verification of DNN architectures. Existing works all embedded watermarks into the model parameters while treating the architecture as public property. These solutions were proven to be vulnerable by an adversary to detect or remove the watermarks. In contrast, we claim the model architectures as an important IP for model owners, and propose to implant watermarks into the architectures. We design new algorithms based on Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to generate watermarked architectures, which are unique enough to represent the ownership, while maintaining high model usability. Such watermarks can be extracted via side-channel-based model extraction techniques with high fidelity. We conduct comprehensive experiments on watermarked CNN models for image classification tasks and the experimental results show our scheme has negligible impact on the model performance, and exhibits strong robustness against various model transformations and adaptive attacks.Ministry of Education (MOE)Nanyang Technological UniversityNational Research Foundation (NRF)Submitted/Accepted versionThis project is in part supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants U21A20463 and 62102052, Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing, China, under Grant cstc2021jcyj-msxmX0744, Singapore National Research Foundation under its National Cybersecurity R\&D Programme (NCR Award NRF2018NCR-NCR009-0001), Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) AcRF Tier 2 MOE-T2EP20121-0006, AcRF Tier 1 RS02/19, and NTU Start-up grant