Recent work has introduced attacks that extract the architecture information of deep neural networks (DNN), as this knowledge enhances an adversary’s capability to conduct attacks on black-box networks. This paper presents the first in-depth security analysis of DNN fingerprinting attacks that exploit cache side-channels.   First, we define the threat model for these attacks:  our adversary does not need the ability to query the victim model; instead, she runs a co-located process on the host machine victim ’s deep learning  (DL) system is running and passively monitors the accesses of the target functions in the shared framework.   Second, we introduce DeepRecon, an attack that reconstructs the architecture of the victim network by using the internal information extracted via Flush+Reload, a cache side-channel technique. Once the attacker observes function invocations that map directly to architecture attributes of the victim network, the attacker can reconstruct the victim’s entire network architecture.   In our evaluation, we demonstrate that an attacker can accurately reconstruct two complex networks (VGG19 and ResNet50) having only observed one forward propagation. Based on the extracted architecture attributes, we also demonstrate that an attacker can build a meta-model that accurately fingerprints the architecture and family of the pre-trained model in a transfer learning setting. From this meta-model,  we evaluate the importance of the observed attributes in the fingerprinting process. Third, we propose and evaluate new framework-level defense techniques that obfuscate our attacker’s observations. Our empirical security analysis represents a step toward understanding the DNNs’ vulnerability to cache side-channel attacks.
We conduct the first in-depth security analysis of DNN fingerprinting attacks that exploit cache side-channels, which represents a step toward understanding the DNN’s vulnerability to side-channel attacks. This paper considers the problem of fingerprinting neural network architectures using cache side channels, and discusses security-through-obscurity defenses. This paper performs cache side-channel attacks to extract attributes of a victim model and infer its architecture, as well as show they can achieve a nearly perfect classification accuracy.