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Spiking neural networks resisted four model-stealing attacks on every dataset, with surrogate agreement 10 to 20 percent lower and adversarial transferability 15 to 25 percent lower than the ANN equivalents

AspireAI community · arXiv
A model behind a query interface exposes more than its predictions, because an adversary can train a surrogate that mimics it. Model stealing attacks are well characterized for conventional neural networks, but spiking neural networks compute differently: sparse discrete spikes and membrane potentials that evolve over time rather than a static input-to-output mapping. The paper tests whether that difference makes them harder to steal, benchmarking the Papernot, Tramer, T-RND and color-perturbation attacks against SNNs and their ANN counterparts on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10. Across every attack and dataset, SNNs proved consistently harder to steal: surrogates of SNNs achieved 10 to 20 percent lower agreement with the target model and 15 to 25 percent lower adversarial transferability than surrogates of ANNs, and the authors attribute this to spike-based time-dependent dynamics producing decision boundaries that ANN surrogates struggle to approximate even under large query budgets. The limitation is the scale of the evaluation: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10 are small.
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