HoneypotNet: Backdoor Attacks Against Model Extraction

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Yixu, Gu, Tianle, Teng, Yan, Wang, Yingchun, Ma, Xingjun
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wang, Yixu
Gu, Tianle
Teng, Yan
Wang, Yingchun
Ma, Xingjun
author_facet Wang, Yixu
Gu, Tianle
Teng, Yan
Wang, Yingchun
Ma, Xingjun
contents Model extraction attacks are one type of inference-time attacks that approximate the functionality and performance of a black-box victim model by launching a certain number of queries to the model and then leveraging the model's predictions to train a substitute model. These attacks pose severe security threats to production models and MLaaS platforms and could cause significant monetary losses to the model owners. A body of work has proposed to defend machine learning models against model extraction attacks, including both active defense methods that modify the model's outputs or increase the query overhead to avoid extraction and passive defense methods that detect malicious queries or leverage watermarks to perform post-verification. In this work, we introduce a new defense paradigm called attack as defense which modifies the model's output to be poisonous such that any malicious users that attempt to use the output to train a substitute model will be poisoned. To this end, we propose a novel lightweight backdoor attack method dubbed HoneypotNet that replaces the classification layer of the victim model with a honeypot layer and then fine-tunes the honeypot layer with a shadow model (to simulate model extraction) via bi-level optimization to modify its output to be poisonous while remaining the original performance. We empirically demonstrate on four commonly used benchmark datasets that HoneypotNet can inject backdoors into substitute models with a high success rate. The injected backdoor not only facilitates ownership verification but also disrupts the functionality of substitute models, serving as a significant deterrent to model extraction attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01090
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HoneypotNet: Backdoor Attacks Against Model Extraction
Wang, Yixu
Gu, Tianle
Teng, Yan
Wang, Yingchun
Ma, Xingjun
Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Model extraction attacks are one type of inference-time attacks that approximate the functionality and performance of a black-box victim model by launching a certain number of queries to the model and then leveraging the model's predictions to train a substitute model. These attacks pose severe security threats to production models and MLaaS platforms and could cause significant monetary losses to the model owners. A body of work has proposed to defend machine learning models against model extraction attacks, including both active defense methods that modify the model's outputs or increase the query overhead to avoid extraction and passive defense methods that detect malicious queries or leverage watermarks to perform post-verification. In this work, we introduce a new defense paradigm called attack as defense which modifies the model's output to be poisonous such that any malicious users that attempt to use the output to train a substitute model will be poisoned. To this end, we propose a novel lightweight backdoor attack method dubbed HoneypotNet that replaces the classification layer of the victim model with a honeypot layer and then fine-tunes the honeypot layer with a shadow model (to simulate model extraction) via bi-level optimization to modify its output to be poisonous while remaining the original performance. We empirically demonstrate on four commonly used benchmark datasets that HoneypotNet can inject backdoors into substitute models with a high success rate. The injected backdoor not only facilitates ownership verification but also disrupts the functionality of substitute models, serving as a significant deterrent to model extraction attacks.
title HoneypotNet: Backdoor Attacks Against Model Extraction
topic Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01090