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Abstract
On-device deep learning (DL) has rapidly gained adoption in mobile apps,
offering the benefits of offline model inference and user privacy preservation
over cloud-based approaches. However, it inevitably stores models on user
devices, introducing new vulnerabilities, particularly model-stealing attacks
and intellectual property infringement. While system-level protections like
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) provide a robust solution, practical
challenges remain in achieving scalable on-device DL model protection,
including complexities in supporting third-party models and limited adoption in
current mobile solutions. Advancements in TEE-enabled hardware, such as
NVIDIA's GPU-based TEEs, may address these obstacles in the future. Currently,
watermarking serves as a common defense against model theft but also faces
challenges here as many mobile app developers lack corresponding machine
learning expertise and the inherent read-only and inference-only nature of
on-device DL models prevents third parties like app stores from implementing
existing watermarking techniques in post-deployment models.
To protect the intellectual property of on-device DL models, in this paper,
we propose THEMIS, an automatic tool that lifts the read-only restriction of
on-device DL models by reconstructing their writable counterparts and leverages
the untrainable nature of on-device DL models to solve watermark parameters and
protect the model owner's intellectual property. Extensive experimental results
across various datasets and model structures show the superiority of THEMIS in
terms of different metrics. Further, an empirical investigation of 403
real-world DL mobile apps from Google Play is performed with a success rate of
81.14%, showing the practicality of THEMIS.