Jonah O'Brien Weiss | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

InferNet: Exploiting Aggregate GPU Profiles as Side-Channel for DNN Architecture Inference

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have become ubiquitous for their ability to solve problems across various domains, including computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition. However, as their adoption grows, they face a range of security threats, such as model stealing, architecture extraction, and manipulation, which can compromise their integrity, privacy, and functionality. Past works have relied on complex, fine-grained, and time-series analysis to launch DNN model extraction attacks. These approaches require extensive amounts of data, which are often challenging to acquire and analyze effectively. This paper introduces InferNet, an attack method that leverages simple, non-intrusive, and coarse-grained system-level information to identify the underlying DNN architecture of a victim's application. By analyzing GPU kernel calls, memory events, and system-level metrics, InferNet fingerprints the DNN and infers its architecture with very high accuracy. It can predict the architecture family (e.g., Inception vs. BERT), as well as the architecture variant (e.g., InceptionV1 vs. InceptionV3). The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of InferNet across AI/ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch), different DNN types (vision, LLMs), and hardware platforms (NVIDIA Tesla T4, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000). The results show that InferNet achieves 100% model extraction accuracy using only a partial GPU profile under various attack settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Hardening DNNs against Transfer Attacks during Network Compression using Greedy Adversarial Pruning

The prevalence and success of Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications in recent years have motivated research on DNN compression, such as pruning and quantization. These techniques accelerate model inference, reduce power consumption, and reduce the size and complexity of the hardware necessary to run DNNs, all with little to no loss in accuracy. However, since DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial inputs, it is important to consider the relationship between compression and adversarial robustness. In this work, we investigate the adversarial robustness of models produced by several irregular pruning schemes and by 8-bit quantization. Additionally, while conventional pruning removes the least important parameters in a DNN, we investigate the effect of an unconventional pruning method: removing the most important model parameters based on the gradient on adversarial inputs. We call this method Greedy Adversarial Pruning (GAP) and we find that this pruning method results in models that are resistant to transfer attacks from their uncompressed counterparts.

cs.LG↗