Knockoff Nets: Stealing Functionality of Black-Box Models

Abstract

Machine Learning (ML) models are increasingly deployed in the wild to perform a wide range of tasks. In this work, we ask to what extent can an adversary steal functionality of such "victim" models based solely on blackbox interactions: image in, predictions out. In contrast to prior work, we present an adversary lacking knowledge of train/test data used by the model, its internals, and semantics over model outputs. We formulate model functionality stealing as a two-step approach: (i) querying a set of input images to the blackbox model to obtain predictions; and (ii) training a "knockoff" with queried image-prediction pairs. We make multiple remarkable observations: (a) querying random images from a different distribution than that of the blackbox training data results in a well-performing knockoff; (b) this is possible even when the knockoff is represented using a different architecture; and (c) our reinforcement learning approach additionally improves query sample efficiency in certain settings and provides performance gains. We validate model functionality stealing on a range of datasets and tasks, as well as show that a reasonable knockoff of an image analysis API could be created for as little as $30.

Resources

• Paper
• Poster
• Extended Abstract
• Code
• Models

Bibtex

@inproceedings{orekondy19knockoff,
    author = {Orekondy, Tribhuvanesh and Schiele, Bernt and Fritz, Mario},
    title = {Knockoff Nets: Stealing Functionality of Black-Box Models},
    booktitle = {Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    year = {2019}
}

Acknowledgement

This research was partially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG CRC 1223).