Detecting Model Extraction Attacks

Authorized Use Only: The extraction, inversion, and membership-inference techniques described here are intended for defenders testing their own models and for red teams operating under written authorization. Querying a third-party model to clone it, reconstruct its training data, or infer membership without permission may violate terms of service, copyright, and privacy law.

Overview

Model extraction is the family of attacks in which an adversary abuses a model's inference API to steal value that the model owner intended to keep private. MITRE ATLAS catalogs these under AML.T0024 — Exfiltration via AI Inference API, in the Exfiltration tactic, with three sub-techniques:

• AML.T0024.000 — Infer Training Data Membership (membership inference): the adversary determines whether a specific record was part of the training set, a privacy violation that can expose, for example, whether a patient's record trained a medical model.
• AML.T0024.001 — Invert AI Model (model inversion): the adversary reconstructs representative training inputs (e.g., faces, text) by exploiting confidence scores returned by the API.
• **AML.T0024…