Title: Data Forging Attacks on Cryptographic Model Certification
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: audit, confidentiality, zero-knowledge, fairness

Abstract: Privacy-preserving machine learning auditing protocols allow auditors to assess models for properties such as fairness or robustness, without revealing their internals or training data. This makes them especially attractive for auditing models deployed in sensitive domains such as healthcare or finance. For these protocols to be truly useful, though, their guarantees must reflect how the model will behave once deployed, not just under the conditions of an audit. Existing security definitions often miss this mark: most certify model behavior only on a *fixed audit dataset*, without ensuring that the same guarantees *generalize* to other datasets drawn from the same distribution. We show that a model provider can attack many cryptographic model certification schemes by forging training data, resulting in a model that exhibits benign behavior during an audit, but pathological behavior in practice. For example, we empirically demonstrate that an attacker can train a model that achieves over 99\% accuracy on an audit dataset, but less than 30\% accuracy on fresh samples from the same distribution.

To address this gap, we formalize the guarantees an auditing framework should achieve and introduce a generic protocol template that meets these requirements. Our results thus offer both cautionary evidence about existing approaches and constructive guidance for designing secure, privacy-preserving ML auditing protocols.