Protecting ownership rights of ML models using watermarking in the light of adversarial attacks

In this paper, we present and analyze two novel—and seemingly distant—research trends in Machine Learning: ML watermarking and adversarial patches. First, we show how ML watermarking uses specially crafted inputs to provide a proof of model ownership. Second, we demonstrate how an attacker can craft adversarial samples in order to trigger an abnormal behavior in a model and thus perform an ambiguity attack on ML watermarking. Finally, we describe three countermeasures that could be applied in order to prevent ambiguity attacks. We illustrate our works using the example of a binary classification model for welding inspection.