International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Model stealing attacks on AI/ML devices undermine intellectual property rights, compromise the competitive advantage of the original model developers, and potentially expose sensitive data embedded in the model’s behavior to unauthorized parties. While previous research works have demonstrated successful side-channelbased model recovery in embedded microcontrollers and FPGA-based accelerators, the exploration of attacks on commercial ML accelerators remains largely unexplored. Moreover, prior side-channel attacks fail when they encounter previously unknown models. This paper demonstrates the first successful model extraction attack on the Google Edge Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), an off-the-shelf ML accelerator. Specifically, we show a hyperparameter stealing attack that can extract all layer configurations including the layer type, number of nodes, kernel/filter sizes, number of filters, strides, padding, and activation function. Most notably, our attack is the first comprehensive attack that can extract previously unseen models. This is achieved through an online template-building approach instead of a pre-trained ML-based approach used in prior works. Our results on a black-box Google Edge TPU evaluation show that, through obtained electromagnetic traces, our proposed framework can achieve 99.91% accuracy, making it the most accurate one to date. Our findings indicate that attackers can successfully extract various types of models on a black-box commercial TPU with utmost detail and call for countermeasures.