Box-Free Model Watermarks Are Prone to Black-Box Removal Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: An, Haonan, Hua, Guang, Lin, Zhiping, Fang, Yuguang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author An, Haonan
Hua, Guang
Lin, Zhiping
Fang, Yuguang
author_facet An, Haonan
Hua, Guang
Lin, Zhiping
Fang, Yuguang
contents Box-free model watermarking is an emerging technique to safeguard the intellectual property of deep learning models, particularly those for low-level image processing tasks. Existing works have verified and improved its effectiveness in several aspects. However, in this paper, we reveal that box-free model watermarking is prone to removal attacks, even under the real-world threat model such that the protected model and the watermark extractor are in black boxes. Under this setting, we carry out three studies. 1) We develop an extractor-gradient-guided (EGG) remover and show its effectiveness when the extractor uses ReLU activation only. 2) More generally, for an unknown extractor, we leverage adversarial attacks and design the EGG remover based on the estimated gradients. 3) Under the most stringent condition that the extractor is inaccessible, we design a transferable remover based on a set of private proxy models. In all cases, the proposed removers can successfully remove embedded watermarks while preserving the quality of the processed images, and we also demonstrate that the EGG remover can even replace the watermarks. Extensive experimental results verify the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed attacks, revealing the vulnerabilities of the existing box-free methods and calling for further research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_09863
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Box-Free Model Watermarks Are Prone to Black-Box Removal Attacks
An, Haonan
Hua, Guang
Lin, Zhiping
Fang, Yuguang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Box-free model watermarking is an emerging technique to safeguard the intellectual property of deep learning models, particularly those for low-level image processing tasks. Existing works have verified and improved its effectiveness in several aspects. However, in this paper, we reveal that box-free model watermarking is prone to removal attacks, even under the real-world threat model such that the protected model and the watermark extractor are in black boxes. Under this setting, we carry out three studies. 1) We develop an extractor-gradient-guided (EGG) remover and show its effectiveness when the extractor uses ReLU activation only. 2) More generally, for an unknown extractor, we leverage adversarial attacks and design the EGG remover based on the estimated gradients. 3) Under the most stringent condition that the extractor is inaccessible, we design a transferable remover based on a set of private proxy models. In all cases, the proposed removers can successfully remove embedded watermarks while preserving the quality of the processed images, and we also demonstrate that the EGG remover can even replace the watermarks. Extensive experimental results verify the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed attacks, revealing the vulnerabilities of the existing box-free methods and calling for further research.
title Box-Free Model Watermarks Are Prone to Black-Box Removal Attacks
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09863