  Model stealing attacks have become a serious concern for deep learning
models, where an attacker can steal a trained model by querying its black-box
API. This can lead to intellectual property theft and other security and
privacy risks. The current state-of-the-art defenses against model stealing
attacks suggest adding perturbations to the prediction probabilities. However,
they suffer from heavy computations and make impracticable assumptions about
the adversary. They often require the training of auxiliary models. This can be
time-consuming and resource-intensive which hinders the deployment of these
defenses in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a simple yet
effective and efficient defense alternative. We introduce a heuristic approach
to perturb the output probabilities. The proposed defense can be easily
integrated into models without additional training. We show that our defense is
effective in defending against three state-of-the-art stealing attacks. We
evaluate our approach on large and quantized (i.e., compressed) Convolutional
Neural Networks (CNNs) trained on several vision datasets. Our technique
outperforms the state-of-the-art defenses with a $\times37$ faster inference
latency without requiring any additional model and with a low impact on the
model's performance. We validate that our defense is also effective for
quantized CNNs targeting edge devices.
