AttestLLM: Efficient Attestation Framework for Billion-scale On-device LLMs

Abstract: As on-device LLMs(e.g., Apple on-device Intelligence) are widely adopted to reduce network dependency, improve privacy, and enhance responsiveness, verifying the legitimacy of models running on local devices becomes critical. Existing attestation techniques are not suitable for billion-parameter LLMs, struggling to remain both time- and memory-efficient while addressing emerging threats in the LLM era. In this paper, we present AttestLLM, the first-of-its-kind attestation framework to protect the hardware-level intellectual property (IP) of device vendors by ensuring that only authorized LLMs can execute on target platforms. AttestLLM leverages an algorithm/software/hardware co-design approach to embed robust watermarking signatures onto the activation distributions of LLM building blocks. It also optimizes the attestation protocol within the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), providing efficient verification without compromising inference throughput. Extensive proof-of-concept evaluations on LLMs from Llama, Qwen, and Phi families for on-device use cases demonstrate AttestLLM's attestation reliability, fidelity, and efficiency. Furthermore, AttestLLM enforces model legitimacy and exhibits resilience against model replacement and forgery attacks.