Recently, machine learning (ML) has introduced advanced solutions to many
domains. Since ML models provide business advantage to model owners, protecting
intellectual property of ML models has emerged as an important consideration.
Confidentiality of ML models can be protected by exposing them to clients only
via prediction APIs. However, model extraction attacks can steal the
functionality of ML models using the information leaked to clients through the
results returned via the API. In this work, we question whether model
extraction is a serious threat to complex, real-life ML models. We evaluate the
current state-of-the-art model extraction attack (Knockoff nets) against
complex models. We reproduce and confirm the results in the original paper. But
we also show that the performance of this attack can be limited by several
factors, including ML model architecture and the granularity of API response.
Furthermore, we introduce a defense based on distinguishing queries used for
Knockoff nets from benign queries. Despite the limitations of the Knockoff
nets, we show that a more realistic adversary can effectively steal complex ML
models and evade known defenses.