TIM: Enabling Large-scale White-box Testing on In-App Deep Learning Models

Intelligent Applications (iApps), equipped with in-App deep learning (DL) models, are emerging to provide reliable DL inference services. However, in-App DL models are typically compiled into inference-only versions to enhance system performance, thereby impeding the evaluation of DL models. Specifically, the assessment of in-App models currently relies on black-box testing methods rather than direct white-box testing approaches. In this work, we propose TIM, an automated tool designed for conducting large-scale white-box testing of in-App models. Taking an iApp as input, TIM can lift the black-box (i.e., inference-only) in-App DL model into a backpropagation-enabled one and package it together, allowing comprehensive DL model testing or security issues detection. TIM proposes two reconstruction techniques to convert the inference-only model to a backpropagation-enabled version and reconstruct the DL-related IO processing code. In our experiments, we utilize TIM to extract 100 unique commercial in-App models and convert the models to white-box models, enabling backpropagation functionality. Experimental results show that TIM’s reconstruction techniques exhibit high accuracy. We open-source our prototype and part of the experimental data on the website https://zenodo.org/record/7548141.