Fawkes

Fawkes is a privacy protection system developed by researchers at SANDLab, University of Chicago. For more information about the project, please refer to our project webpage. Contact us at fawkes-team@googlegroups.com.

We published an academic paper to summarize our work "Fawkes: Protecting Personal Privacy against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models" at USENIX Security 2020.

NEW! If you would like to use Fawkes to protect your identity, please check out our software and binary implementation on the website.

Copyright

This code is intended only for personal privacy protection or academic research.

We are currently exploring the filing of a provisional patent on the Fawkes algorithm.

Usage

$ fawkes

Options:

• -m, --mode : the tradeoff between privacy and perturbation size. Select from min, low, mid, high. The higher the mode is, the more perturbation will add to the image and provide stronger protection.
• -d, --directory : the directory with images to run protection.
• -g, --gpu : the GPU id when using GPU for optimization.
• --batch-size : number of images to run optimization together. Change to >1 only if you have extremely powerful compute power.
• --format : format of the output image (png or jpg).

when --mode is custom:

• --th : perturbation threshold
• --max-step : number of optimization steps to run
• --lr : learning rate for the optimization
• --feature-extractor : name of the feature extractor to use
• --separate_target : whether select separate targets for each faces in the diectory.

Example

fawkes -d ./imgs --mode min

Tips

• The perturbation generation takes ~60 seconds per image on a CPU machine, and it would be much faster on a GPU machine. Use batch-size=1 on CPU and batch-size>1 on GPUs.
• Turn on separate target if the images in the directory belong to different people, otherwise, turn it off.
• Run on GPU. The current Fawkes package and binary does not support GPU. To use GPU, you need to clone this, install the required packages in setup.py, and replace tensorflow with tensorflow-gpu. Then you can run Fawkes by python3 fawkes/protection.py [args].

How do I know my images are secure?

We are actively working on this. Python scripts that can test the protection effectiveness will be ready shortly.

Quick Installation

Install from PyPI:

pip install fawkes

If you don't have root privilege, please try to install on user namespace: pip install --user fawkes.

Contribute to Fawkes

If you would like to contribute to make Fawkes software better, please checkout our project list which contains our TODOs. If you are confident in helping, please open a pull requests and explain the plans for your changes. We will try our best to approve asap, and once approved, you can work on it.

Citation

@inproceedings{shan2020fawkes,
  title={Fawkes: Protecting Personal Privacy against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models},
  author={Shan, Shawn and Wenger, Emily and Zhang, Jiayun and Li, Huiying and Zheng, Haitao and Zhao, Ben Y},
  booktitle="Proc. of USENIX Security",
  year={2020}
}