DeepPeep: Exploiting Design Ramifications to Decipher the Architecture of Compact DNNs

AbstractThe remarkable predictive performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) has led to their adoption in service domains of unprecedented scale and scope. However, the widespread adoption and growing commercialization of DNNs have underscored the importance of intellectual property (IP) protection. Devising techniques to ensure IP protection has become necessary due to the increasing trend of outsourcing the DNN computations on the untrusted accelerators in cloud-based services. The design methodologies and hyper-parameters of DNNs are crucial information, and leaking them may cause massive economic loss to the organization. Furthermore, the knowledge of DNN’s architecture can increase the success probability of an adversarial attack where an adversary perturbs the inputs and alters the prediction.In this work, we devise a two-stage attack methodology “DeepPeep,” which exploits the distinctive characteristics of design methodologies to reverse-engineer the architecture of building blocks in compact DNNs. We show the efficacy of “DeepPeep” on P100 and P4000 GPUs. Additionally, we propose intelligent design maneuvering strategies for thwarting IP theft through the DeepPeep attack and proposed “Secure MobileNet-V1.” Interestingly, compared to vanilla MobileNet-V1, secure MobileNet-V1 provides a significant reduction in inference latency (≈60%) and improvement in predictive performance (≈2%) with very low memory and computation overheads.