A well-trained DNN model can be regarded as an intellectual property (IP) of the model owner. To date, many DNN IP protection methods have been proposed, but most of them are watermarking based verification methods where model owners can only verify their ownership passively after the copyright of DNN models has been infringed. In this paper, we propose an effective framework to actively protect the DNN IP from infringement. Specifically, we encrypt the DNN models parameters by perturbing them with well-crafted adversarial perturbations. With the encrypted parameters, the accuracy of the DNN model drops significantly, which can prevent malicious infringers from using the model. After the encryption, the positions of encrypted parameters and the values of the added adversarial perturbations form a secret key. Authorized user can use the secret key to decrypt the model. Compared with the watermarking methods which only passively verify the ownership after the infringement occurs, the proposed method can prevent infringement in advance. Moreover, compared with most of the existing active DNN IP protection methods, the proposed method does not require additional training process of the model, which introduces low computational overhead. Experimental results show that, after the encryption, the test accuracy of the model drops by 80.65%, 81.16%, and 87.91% on Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and GTSRB, respectively. Moreover, the proposed method only needs to encrypt an extremely low number of parameters, and the proportion of the encrypted parameters of all the models parameters is as low as 0.000205%. The experimental results also indicate that, the proposed method is robust against model fine-tuning attack and model pruning attack. Moreover, for the adaptive attack where attackers know the detailed steps of the proposed method, the proposed method is also demonstrated to be robust.
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