The remarkable predictive performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) has led
to their adoption in service domains of unprecedented scale and scope. However,
the widespread adoption and growing commercialization of DNNs have underscored
the importance of intellectual property (IP) protection. Devising techniques to
ensure IP protection has become necessary due to the increasing trend of
outsourcing the DNN computations on the untrusted accelerators in cloud-based
services. The design methodologies and hyper-parameters of DNNs are crucial
information, and leaking them may cause massive economic loss to the
organization. Furthermore, the knowledge of DNN's architecture can increase the
success probability of an adversarial attack where an adversary perturbs the
inputs and alter the prediction.
In this work, we devise a two-stage attack methodology "DeepPeep" which
exploits the distinctive characteristics of design methodologies to
reverse-engineer the architecture of building blocks in compact DNNs. We show
the efficacy of "DeepPeep" on P100 and P4000 GPUs. Additionally, we propose
intelligent design maneuvering strategies for thwarting IP theft through the
DeepPeep attack and proposed "Secure MobileNet-V1". Interestingly, compared to
vanilla MobileNet-V1, secure MobileNet-V1 provides a significant reduction in
inference latency ($\approx$60%) and improvement in predictive performance
($\approx$2%) with very-low memory and computation overheads.