WARDEN: Multi-Directional Backdoor Watermarks for Embedding-as-a-Service
  Copyright Protection
Anudeex Shetty Yue Teng Ke He Qiongkai Xu
Embedding as a Service (EaaS) has become a widely adopted solution, which
offers feature extraction capabilities for addressing various downstream tasks
in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Prior studies have shown that EaaS can be
prone to model extraction attacks; nevertheless, this concern could be
mitigated by adding backdoor watermarks to the text embeddings and subsequently
verifying the attack models post-publication. Through the analysis of the
recent watermarking strategy for EaaS, EmbMarker, we design a novel CSE
(Clustering, Selection, Elimination) attack that removes the backdoor watermark
while maintaining the high utility of embeddings, indicating that the previous
watermarking approach can be breached. In response to this new threat, we
propose a new protocol to make the removal of watermarks more challenging by
incorporating multiple possible watermark directions. Our defense approach,
WARDEN, notably increases the stealthiness of watermarks and empirically has
been shown effective against CSE attack.