DIA: Diffusion based Inverse Network Attack on Collaborative Inference

Dake Chen, Shiduo Li, Yuke Zhang, Chenghao Li, Souvik Kundu, Peter A. Beerel; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2024, pp. 124-130

With the continuous expansion of neural networks in size and depth and the growing popularity of machine learning as a service collaborative inference systems present a promising approach for deploying models in resource-constrained computing environments. However as the deployment of these systems gains traction evaluating their privacy and security has become a critical issue. Towards this goal this paper introduces a diffusion-based inverse network attack named DIA for collaborative inference systems that uses a novel feature map awareness conditioning mechanism to guide the diffusion model. Compared to prior approaches our extensive empirical results demonstrate that the proposed attack achieves an average improvement of 29% 20% 30% in terms of SSIM PSNR and MSE when applied to convolutional neural networks (CNN) 18% 17% 61% to ResNet models and 55% 54% 84% to Vision transformers (ViTs). Our results identify the significant vulnerability of ViTs and analyze the potential sources of this vulnerability. Based on our analysis we raise caution regarding the deployment of transformer-based models in collaborative inference systems emphasizing the need for careful consideration regarding the security of such models in collaborative settings.