Hiding Directions, Leaking Structure: Breaking ArrowCloak through Low-Rank Structure

Abstract

TEE-shielded inference keeps sensitive state in a trusted execution environment (TEE) while offloading linear algebra to an untrusted accelerator. Wang et al., in Game of Arrows (USENIX Security 2025), showed that five widely adopted lightweight defenses preserve vector directions and introduced ArrowMatch to exploit this leakage. They then proposed ArrowCloak, which adds a different multiple of one shared mask direction to each vector and bases its weight-recovery hardness argument on Learning with Errors (LWE). ArrowCloak successfully reduces ArrowMatch to near-black-box levels. In this paper, we revisit ArrowCloak from cryptographic and structural perspectives. Its LWE formulation does not by itself establish standard LWE hardness: the reduction direction, quantized arithmetic, and joint instance distribution do not meet the required conditions. Reusing one mask direction leaves a recoverable rank-one component across the released matrix. We exploit this structure with our proposed attack, an end-to-end, query-free recovery attack. Given a public checkpoint and the obfuscated weights, the attack removes the masking subspace, recovers the hidden one-to-one correspondence, and reconstructs protected weights without transformation secrets, victim queries, or fine-tuning data. Across six model-task pairs spanning classification, segmentation, and diffusion, the attack recovers 99.92%-100% of hidden vector correspondences. Reconstructed classification models achieve 94.39%-99.54% victim agreement and differ by at most 1.59 percentage points in accuracy; the recovered segmentation model achieves 98.35% output agreement. These findings suggest that lightweight protection should address both per-vector geometry and joint structure across released weights.

17 pages, 3 figures