Hashed Watermark as a Filter: Defeating Forging and Overwriting Attacks in Weight-based Neural Network Watermarking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yao, Yuan, Song, Jin, Jin, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yao, Yuan
Song, Jin
Jin, Jian
author_facet Yao, Yuan
Song, Jin
Jin, Jian
contents As valuable digital assets, deep neural networks necessitate robust ownership protection, positioning neural network watermarking (NNW) as a promising solution. Among various NNW approaches, weight-based methods are favored for their simplicity and practicality; however, they remain vulnerable to forging and overwriting attacks. To address those challenges, we propose NeuralMark, a robust method built around a hashed watermark filter. Specifically, we utilize a hash function to generate an irreversible binary watermark from a secret key, which is then used as a filter to select the model parameters for embedding. This design cleverly intertwines the embedding parameters with the hashed watermark, providing a robust defense against both forging and overwriting attacks. An average pooling is also incorporated to resist fine-tuning and pruning attacks. Furthermore, it can be seamlessly integrated into various neural network architectures, ensuring broad applicability. Theoretically, we analyze its security boundary. Empirically, we verify its effectiveness and robustness across 13 distinct Convolutional and Transformer architectures, covering five image classification tasks and one text generation task. The source codes are available at https://github.com/AIResearch-Group/NeuralMark.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_11137
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hashed Watermark as a Filter: Defeating Forging and Overwriting Attacks in Weight-based Neural Network Watermarking
Yao, Yuan
Song, Jin
Jin, Jian
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
As valuable digital assets, deep neural networks necessitate robust ownership protection, positioning neural network watermarking (NNW) as a promising solution. Among various NNW approaches, weight-based methods are favored for their simplicity and practicality; however, they remain vulnerable to forging and overwriting attacks. To address those challenges, we propose NeuralMark, a robust method built around a hashed watermark filter. Specifically, we utilize a hash function to generate an irreversible binary watermark from a secret key, which is then used as a filter to select the model parameters for embedding. This design cleverly intertwines the embedding parameters with the hashed watermark, providing a robust defense against both forging and overwriting attacks. An average pooling is also incorporated to resist fine-tuning and pruning attacks. Furthermore, it can be seamlessly integrated into various neural network architectures, ensuring broad applicability. Theoretically, we analyze its security boundary. Empirically, we verify its effectiveness and robustness across 13 distinct Convolutional and Transformer architectures, covering five image classification tasks and one text generation task. The source codes are available at https://github.com/AIResearch-Group/NeuralMark.
title Hashed Watermark as a Filter: Defeating Forging and Overwriting Attacks in Weight-based Neural Network Watermarking
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11137