Intellectual Property (IP) Protection for Deep Learning and Federated Learning Models

This talk focuses on end-to-end protection of the present and emerging Deep Learning (DL) and Federated Learning (FL) models. On the one hand, DL and FL models are usually trained by allocating significant computational resources to process massive training data. The built models are therefore considered as the owner's IP and need to be protected. On the other hand, malicious attackers may take advantage of the models for illegal usages. IP protection needs to be considered during the design and training of the DL models before the owners make their models publicly available. The tremendous parameter space of DL models allows them to learn hidden features automatically.

We explore the 'over-parameterization' of DL models and demonstrate how to hide additional information within DL. Particularly, we discuss a number of our end-to-end automated frameworks over the past few years that leverage information hiding for IP protection, including: DeepSigns[5] and DeepMarks[2], the first DL watermarking and fingerprinting frameworks that work by embedding the owner's signature in the dynamic activations and output behaviors of the DL model; DeepAttest[1], the first hardware-based attestation framework for verifying the legitimacy of the deployed model via on-device attestation. We also develop a multi-bit black-box DNN watermarking scheme[3] and demonstrate spread spectrum-based DL watermarking[4]. In the context of Federated Learning (FL), we show how these results can be leveraged for the design of a novel holistic covert communication framework that allows stealthy information sharing between local clients while preserving FL convergence. We conclude by outlining the open challenges and emerging directions.