DNNCloak: Secure DNN Models Against Memory Side-channel Based Reverse Engineering Attacks

As deep neural networks (DNN) expand their attention into various domains and the high cost of training a model, the structure of a DNN model has become a valuable intellectual property and needs to be protected. However, reversing DNN models by exploiting side-channel leakage has been demonstrated in various ways. Even if the model is encrypted and the processing hardware units are trusted, the attacker can still extract the model’s structure and critical parameters through side channels, potentially posing significant commercial risks. In this paper, we begin by analyzing representative memory side-channel attacks on DNN models and identifying the primary causes of leakage. We also find that the full encryption used to protect model parameters could add extensive overhead. Based on our observations, we propose DNNCloak, a lightweight and secure framework aiming at mitigating reverse engineering attacks on common DNN architectures. DNNCloak includes a set of obfuscation schemes that increase the difficulty of reverse-engineering the DNN structure. Additionally, DNNCloak reduces the overhead of full weights encryption with an efficient matrix permutation scheme, resulting in reduced memory access time and enhanced security against retraining attacks on the model parameters. At last, we show how DNNCloak can defend DNN models from side-channel attacks effectively, with minimal performance overhead.