arXiv:2508.15036cs.CRcs.AI2025-08被引 14

MoE模型路由特征可被侧信道攻击暴露用户隐私,首度揭示其安全风险。

MoEcho: Exploiting Side-Channel Attacks to Compromise User Privacy in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

  • 利用CPU/GPU硬件执行痕迹发现四种新型侧信道漏洞
  • 成功实现提示词、回复、图像等敏感信息的逆向重建
  • 适合关注AI安全、隐私保护的研究者与开发者参考

Transformer架构已成为现代人工智能的核心,推动自然语言处理、计算机视觉和多模态学习的飞速发展。随着模型规模持续扩大以提升性能,实现效率仍是关键挑战。混合专家(MoE)架构通过选择性激活专用子网络,在模型精度与计算成本间取得独特平衡。然而,MoE中基于语义的动态路由机制无意间暴露了新的隐私泄露面:输入依赖的激活模式在硬件执行中留下独特的时空痕迹,攻击者可借此推断敏感用户数据。本文提出MoEcho,首次系统揭示基于MoE架构的运行时侧信道攻击面。具体地,我们在不同计算平台发现四种新型侧信道:CPU上的缓存占用通道与页面换出+重载通道,GPU上的性能计数器通道与TLB清除+重载通道。利用这些漏洞,我们设计四种攻击:提示词推断攻击、回复重构攻击、视觉推断攻击和视觉重构攻击,有效突破基于MoE的大语言模型(LLMs)与视觉语言模型(VLMs)的隐私保护。本工作是首个针对主流MoE结构的架构级安全分析,揭示严重安全隐患,亟需为大规模高效AI服务部署及时制定防护策略。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The transformer architecture has become a cornerstone of modern AI, fueling remarkable progress across applications in natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal learning. As these models continue to scale explosively for performance, implementation efficiency remains a critical challenge. Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures, selectively activating specialized subnetworks (experts), offer a unique balance between model accuracy and computational cost. However, the adaptive routing in MoE architectures, where input tokens are dynamically directed to specialized experts based on their semantic meaning inadvertently opens up a new attack surface for privacy breaches. These input-dependent activation patterns leave distinctive temporal and spatial traces in hardware execution, which adversaries could exploit to deduce sensitive user data. In this work, we propose MoEcho, discovering a side channel analysis based attack surface that compromises user privacy on MoE based systems. Specifically, in MoEcho, we introduce four novel architectural side channels on different computing platforms, including Cache Occupancy Channels and Pageout+Reload on CPUs, and Performance Counter and TLB Evict+Reload on GPUs, respectively. Exploiting these vulnerabilities, we propose four attacks that effectively breach user privacy in large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) based on MoE architectures: Prompt Inference Attack, Response Reconstruction Attack, Visual Inference Attack, and Visual Reconstruction Attack. MoEcho is the first runtime architecture level security analysis of the popular MoE structure common in modern transformers, highlighting a serious security and privacy threat and calling for effective and timely safeguards when harnessing MoE based models for developing efficient large scale AI services.

AI安全侧信道攻击MoE模型隐私保护

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