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ObfuNAS: A Neural Architecture Search-based DNN Obfuscation Approach

Cryptography and Security 2022-08-25 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Malicious architecture extraction has been emerging as a crucial concern for deep neural network (DNN) security. As a defense, architecture obfuscation is proposed to remap the victim DNN to a different architecture. Nonetheless, we observe that, with only extracting an obfuscated DNN architecture, the adversary can still retrain a substitute model with high performance (e.g., accuracy), rendering the obfuscation techniques ineffective. To mitigate this under-explored vulnerability, we propose ObfuNAS, which converts the DNN architecture obfuscation into a neural architecture search (NAS) problem. Using a combination of function-preserving obfuscation strategies, ObfuNAS ensures that the obfuscated DNN architecture can only achieve lower accuracy than the victim. We validate the performance of ObfuNAS with open-source architecture datasets like NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-301. The experimental results demonstrate that ObfuNAS can successfully find the optimal mask for a victim model within a given FLOPs constraint, leading up to 2.6% inference accuracy degradation for attackers with only 0.14x FLOPs overhead. The code is available at: https://github.com/Tongzhou0101/ObfuNAS.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.08569,
  title  = {ObfuNAS: A Neural Architecture Search-based DNN Obfuscation Approach},
  author = {Tong Zhou and Shaolei Ren and Xiaolin Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.08569},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

9 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:47:03.657Z