  Recent increases in the computational demands of deep neural networks (DNNs)
have sparked interest in efficient deep learning mechanisms, e.g., quantization
or pruning. These mechanisms enable the construction of a small, efficient
version of commercial-scale models with comparable accuracy, accelerating their
deployment to resource-constrained devices.
  In this paper, we study the security considerations of publishing on-device
variants of large-scale models. We first show that an adversary can exploit
on-device models to make attacking the large models easier. In evaluations
across 19 DNNs, by exploiting the published on-device models as a transfer
prior, the adversarial vulnerability of the original commercial-scale models
increases by up to 100x. We then show that the vulnerability increases as the
similarity between a full-scale and its efficient model increase. Based on the
insights, we propose a defense, $similarity$-$unpairing$, that fine-tunes
on-device models with the objective of reducing the similarity. We evaluated
our defense on all the 19 DNNs and found that it reduces the transferability up
to 90% and the number of queries required by a factor of 10-100x. Our results
suggest that further research is needed on the security (or even privacy)
threats caused by publishing those efficient siblings.
