CSI Neural Network: Using Side-channels to Recover Your Artificial Neural Network Information

Machine learning has become mainstream across industries. Numerous examples proved the validity of it for security applications. In this work, we investigate how to reverse engineer a neural network by using only power side-channel information. To this end, we consider a multilayer perceptron as the machine learning architecture of choice and assume a non-invasive and eavesdropping attacker capable of measuring only passive side-channel leakages like power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, and reaction time. We conduct all experiments on real data and common neural net architectures in order to properly assess the applicability and extendability of those attacks. Practical results are shown on an ARM CORTEX-M3 microcontroller. Our experiments show that the side-channel attacker is capable of obtaining the following information: the activation functions used in the architecture, the number of layers and neurons in the layers, the number of output classes, and weights in the neural network. Thus, the attacker can effectively reverse engineer the network using side-channel information. Next, we show that once the attacker has the knowledge about the neural network architecture, he/she could also recover the inputs to the network with only a single-shot measurement. Finally, we discuss several mitigations one could use to thwart such attacks.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figure

A Survey of Techniques for Improving Security of GPUs

Graphics processing unit (GPU), although a powerful performance-booster, also has many security vulnerabilities. Due to these, the GPU can act as a safe-haven for stealthy malware and the weakest `link' in the security `chain'. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques for analyzing and improving GPU security. We classify the works on key attributes to highlight their similarities and differences. More than informing users and researchers about GPU security techniques, this survey aims to increase their awareness about GPU security vulnerabilities and potential countermeasures

Defense against ML-based Power Side-channel Attacks on DNN Accelerators with Adversarial Attacks

Artificial Intelligence (AI) hardware accelerators have been widely adopted to enhance the efficiency of deep learning applications. However, they also raise security concerns regarding their vulnerability to power side-channel attacks (SCA). In these attacks, the adversary exploits unintended communication channels to infer sensitive information processed by the accelerator, posing significant privacy and copyright risks to the models. Advanced machine learning algorithms are further employed to facilitate the side-channel analysis and exacerbate the privacy issue of AI accelerators. Traditional defense strategies naively inject execution noise to the runtime of AI models, which inevitably introduce large overheads. In this paper, we present AIAShield, a novel defense methodology to safeguard FPGA-based AI accelerators and mitigate model extraction threats via power-based SCAs. The key insight of AIAShield is to leverage the prominent adversarial attack technique from the machine learning community to craft delicate noise, which can significantly obfuscate the adversary's side-channel observation while incurring minimal overhead to the execution of the protected model. At the hardware level, we design a new module based on ring oscillators to achieve fine-grained noise generation. At the algorithm level, we repurpose Neural Architecture Search to worsen the adversary's extraction results. Extensive experiments on the Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) demonstrate that AIAShield outperforms existing solutions with excellent transferability