Hyperparameters are critical in machine learning, as different
hyperparameters often result in models with significantly different
performance. Hyperparameters may be deemed confidential because of their
commercial value and the confidentiality of the proprietary algorithms that the
learner uses to learn them. In this work, we propose attacks on stealing the
hyperparameters that are learned by a learner. We call our attacks
hyperparameter stealing attacks. Our attacks are applicable to a variety of
popular machine learning algorithms such as ridge regression, logistic
regression, support vector machine, and neural network. We evaluate the
effectiveness of our attacks both theoretically and empirically. For instance,
we evaluate our attacks on Amazon Machine Learning. Our results demonstrate
that our attacks can accurately steal hyperparameters. We also study
countermeasures. Our results highlight the need for new defenses against our
hyperparameter stealing attacks for certain machine learning algorithms.