2021 Volume E104.A Issue 1 Pages 152-161
A model extraction attack is a security issue in deep neural networks (DNNs). Information on a trained DNN model is an attractive target for an adversary not only in terms of intellectual property but also of security. Thus, an adversary tries to reveal the sensitive information contained in the trained DNN model from machine-learning services. Previous studies on model extraction attacks assumed that the victim provides a machine-learning cloud service and the adversary accesses the service through formal queries. However, when a DNN model is implemented on an edge device, adversaries can physically access the device and try to reveal the sensitive information contained in the implemented DNN model. We call these physical model extraction attacks model reverse-engineering (MRE) attacks to distinguish them from attacks on cloud services. Power side-channel analyses are often used in MRE attacks to reveal the internal operation from power consumption or electromagnetic leakage. Previous studies, including ours, evaluated MRE attacks against several types of DNN processors with power side-channel analyses. In this paper, information leakage from a systolic array which is used for the matrix multiplication unit in the DNN processors is evaluated. We utilized correlation power analysis (CPA) for the MRE attack and reveal weight parameters of a DNN model from the systolic array. Two types of the systolic array were implemented on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to demonstrate that CPA reveals weight parameters from those systolic arrays. In addition, we applied an extended analysis approach called “chain CPA” for robust CPA analysis against the systolic arrays. Our experimental results indicate that an adversary can reveal trained model parameters from a DNN accelerator even if the DNN model parameters in the off-chip bus are protected with data encryption. Countermeasures against side-channel leaks will be important for implementing a DNN accelerator on a FPGA or application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC).