A Protection against the Extraction of Neural Network Models

Abstract

Given oracle access to a Neural Network (NN), it is possible to extract its underlying model. We here introduce a protection by adding parasitic layers which keep the underlying NN’s predictions mostly unchanged while complexifying the task of reverse-engineering. Our countermeasure relies on approximating a noisy identity mapping with a Convolutional NN. We explain why the introduction of new parasitic layers complexifies the attacks. We report experiments regarding the performance and the accuracy of the protected NN.