Well, ofc this is illegal except for reseach purposes. Our goal was to showcase the inefficiency of classical software protection for protecting AI model against extraction. But yes, this is kind of scary to see how easy it is to steal someone else' IP

Yes indeed, the specifities of AI deployment make models very hard to protect! you can check our work at Skyld if you are interested in this topic.

Yup, encryption protects at rest but not during runtime.