Deep neural networks have had enormous impact on various domains of computer science, considerably outperforming previous state of the art machine learning techniques. To achieve this performance, neural networks need large quantities of data and huge computational resources, which heavily increases their construction costs. The increased cost of building a good deep neural network model gives rise to a need for protecting this investment from potential copyright infringements. Legitimate owners of a machine learning model want to be able to reliably track and detect a malicious adversary that tries to steal the intellectual property related to the model. Recently, this problem was tackled by introducing in deep neural networks the concept of watermarking, which allows a legitimate owner to embed some secret information(watermark) in a given model. The watermark allows the legitimate owner to detect copyright infringements of his model. This paper focuses on verifying the robustness and reliability of state-of- the-art deep neural network watermarking schemes. We show that, a malicious adversary, even in scenarios where the watermark is difficult to remove, can still evade the verification by the legitimate owners, thus avoiding the detection of model theft.
Deep Neural Networks have recently gained lots of success after enabling several breakthroughs in notoriously challenging problems. Training these networks is computationally expensive and requires vast amounts of training data. Selling such pre-trained models can, therefore, be a lucrative business model. Unfortunately, once the models are sold they can be easily copied and redistributed. To avoid this, a tracking mechanism to identify models as the intellectual property of a particular vendor is necessary. In this work, we present an approach for watermarking Deep Neural Networks in a black-box way. Our scheme works for general classification tasks and can easily be combined with current learning algorithms. We show experimentally that such a watermark has no noticeable impact on the primary task that the model is designed for. Moreover, we evaluate the robustness of our proposal against a multitude of practical attacks. The state of the art performance of deep learning models comes at a high cost for companies and institutions, due to the tedious data collection and the heavy processing requirements. Recently, (2017) proposed to watermark convolutional neural networks by embedding information into their weights. While this is a clear progress towards model protection, this technique solely allows for extracting the watermark from a network that one accesses locally and entirely. This is a clear impediment, as leaked models can be re-used privately, and thus not released publicly for ownership inspection. Instead, we aim at allowing the extraction of the watermark from a neural network (or any other machine learning model) that is operated remotely, and available through a service API. To this end, we propose to operate on the model's action itself, tweaking slightly its decision frontiers so that a set of specific queries convey the desired information. In present paper, we formally introduce the problem and propose a novel zero-bit watermarking algorithm that makes use of adversarial model examples. While limiting the loss of performance of the protected model, this algorithm allows subsequent extraction of the watermark using only few remote queries. We experiment this approach on the MNIST dataset with three types of neural networks, demonstrating that e.g., watermarking with 100 images incurs a slight accuracy degradation, while being resilient to most removal attacks. Deep learning-based techniques have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of recognition and classification tasks. However, these networks are typically computationally expensive to train, requiring weeks of computation on many GPUs; as a result, many users outsource the training procedure to the cloud or rely on pre-trained models that are then fine-tuned for a specific task. In this paper we show that outsourced training introduces new security risks: an adversary can create a maliciously trained network (a backdoored neural network, or a ) that has state-of-the-art performance on the user's training and validation samples, but behaves badly on specific attacker-chosen inputs. We first explore the properties of BadNets in a toy example, by creating a backdoored handwritten digit classifier. Next, we demonstrate backdoors in a more realistic scenario by creating a U.S. street sign classifier that identifies stop signs as speed limits when a special sticker is added to the stop sign; we then show in addition that the backdoor in our US street sign detector can persist even if the network is later retrained for another task and cause a drop in accuracy of 25 on average when the backdoor trigger is present. These results demonstrate that backdoors in neural networks are both powerful and---because the behavior of neural networks is difficult to explicate---stealthy. This work provides motivation for further research into techniques for verifying and inspecting neural networks, just as we have developed tools for verifying and debugging software.