Amulet: Fast TEE-Shielded Inference for On-Device Model Protection

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mao, Zikai, Zhao, Lingchen, Xu, Lei, Dong, Wentao, Zhang, Shenyi, Wang, Cong, Wang, Qian
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Mao, Zikai
Zhao, Lingchen
Xu, Lei
Dong, Wentao
Zhang, Shenyi
Wang, Cong
Wang, Qian
author_facet Mao, Zikai
Zhao, Lingchen
Xu, Lei
Dong, Wentao
Zhang, Shenyi
Wang, Cong
Wang, Qian
contents On-device machine learning (ML) introduces new security concerns about model privacy. Storing valuable trained ML models on user devices exposes them to potential extraction by adversaries. The current mainstream solution for on-device model protection is storing the weights and conducting inference within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). However, due to limited trusted memory that cannot accommodate the whole model, most existing approaches employ a partitioning strategy, dividing a model into multiple slices that are loaded into the TEE sequentially. This frequent interaction between untrusted and trusted worlds dramatically increases inference latency, sometimes by orders of magnitude. In this paper, we propose Amulet, a fast TEE-shielded on-device inference framework for ML model protection. Amulet incorporates a suite of obfuscation methods specifically designed for common neural network architectures. After obfuscation by the TEE, the entire transformed model can be securely stored in untrusted memory, allowing the inference process to execute directly in untrusted memory with GPU acceleration. For each inference request, only two rounds of minimal-overhead interaction between untrusted and trusted memory are required to process input samples and output results. We also provide theoretical proof from an information-theoretic perspective that the obfuscated model does not leak information about the original weights. We comprehensively evaluated Amulet using diverse model architectures ranging from ResNet-18 to GPT-2. Our approach incurs inference latency only 2.8-4.8x that of unprotected models with negligible accuracy loss, achieving an 8-9x speedup over baseline methods that execute inference entirely within TEEs, and performing approximately 2.2x faster than the state-of-the-art obfuscation-based method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07495
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Amulet: Fast TEE-Shielded Inference for On-Device Model Protection
Mao, Zikai
Zhao, Lingchen
Xu, Lei
Dong, Wentao
Zhang, Shenyi
Wang, Cong
Wang, Qian
Cryptography and Security
On-device machine learning (ML) introduces new security concerns about model privacy. Storing valuable trained ML models on user devices exposes them to potential extraction by adversaries. The current mainstream solution for on-device model protection is storing the weights and conducting inference within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). However, due to limited trusted memory that cannot accommodate the whole model, most existing approaches employ a partitioning strategy, dividing a model into multiple slices that are loaded into the TEE sequentially. This frequent interaction between untrusted and trusted worlds dramatically increases inference latency, sometimes by orders of magnitude. In this paper, we propose Amulet, a fast TEE-shielded on-device inference framework for ML model protection. Amulet incorporates a suite of obfuscation methods specifically designed for common neural network architectures. After obfuscation by the TEE, the entire transformed model can be securely stored in untrusted memory, allowing the inference process to execute directly in untrusted memory with GPU acceleration. For each inference request, only two rounds of minimal-overhead interaction between untrusted and trusted memory are required to process input samples and output results. We also provide theoretical proof from an information-theoretic perspective that the obfuscated model does not leak information about the original weights. We comprehensively evaluated Amulet using diverse model architectures ranging from ResNet-18 to GPT-2. Our approach incurs inference latency only 2.8-4.8x that of unprotected models with negligible accuracy loss, achieving an 8-9x speedup over baseline methods that execute inference entirely within TEEs, and performing approximately 2.2x faster than the state-of-the-art obfuscation-based method.
title Amulet: Fast TEE-Shielded Inference for On-Device Model Protection
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07495