BarkBeetle: Stealing Decision Tree Models with Fault Injection

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Wang, Qifan, Sander, Jonas, Jiang, Minmin, Eisenbarth, Thomas, Oswald, David
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866918249404301312
author Wang, Qifan
Sander, Jonas
Jiang, Minmin
Eisenbarth, Thomas
Oswald, David
author_facet Wang, Qifan
Sander, Jonas
Jiang, Minmin
Eisenbarth, Thomas
Oswald, David
contents Machine learning models, particularly decision trees (DTs), are widely adopted across various domains due to their interpretability and efficiency. However, as ML models become increasingly integrated into privacy-sensitive applications, concerns about their confidentiality have grown, particularly in light of emerging threats such as model extraction and fault injection attacks. Assessing the vulnerability of DTs under such attacks is therefore important. In this work, we present BarkBeetle, a novel attack that leverages fault injection to extract internal structural information of DT models. BarkBeetle employs a bottom-up recovery strategy that uses targeted fault injection at specific nodes to efficiently infer feature splits and threshold values. Our proof-of-concept implementation demonstrates that BarkBeetle requires significantly fewer queries and recovers more structural information compared to prior approaches, when evaluated on DTs trained with public UCI datasets. To validate its practical feasibility, we implement BarkBeetle on a Raspberry Pi RP2350 board and perform fault injections using the Faultier voltage glitching tool. As BarkBeetle targets general DT models, we also provide an in-depth discussion on its applicability to a broader range of tree-based applications, including data stream classification, DT variants, and cryptography schemes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06986
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BarkBeetle: Stealing Decision Tree Models with Fault Injection
Wang, Qifan
Sander, Jonas
Jiang, Minmin
Eisenbarth, Thomas
Oswald, David
Cryptography and Security
Machine learning models, particularly decision trees (DTs), are widely adopted across various domains due to their interpretability and efficiency. However, as ML models become increasingly integrated into privacy-sensitive applications, concerns about their confidentiality have grown, particularly in light of emerging threats such as model extraction and fault injection attacks. Assessing the vulnerability of DTs under such attacks is therefore important. In this work, we present BarkBeetle, a novel attack that leverages fault injection to extract internal structural information of DT models. BarkBeetle employs a bottom-up recovery strategy that uses targeted fault injection at specific nodes to efficiently infer feature splits and threshold values. Our proof-of-concept implementation demonstrates that BarkBeetle requires significantly fewer queries and recovers more structural information compared to prior approaches, when evaluated on DTs trained with public UCI datasets. To validate its practical feasibility, we implement BarkBeetle on a Raspberry Pi RP2350 board and perform fault injections using the Faultier voltage glitching tool. As BarkBeetle targets general DT models, we also provide an in-depth discussion on its applicability to a broader range of tree-based applications, including data stream classification, DT variants, and cryptography schemes.
title BarkBeetle: Stealing Decision Tree Models with Fault Injection
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06986