Do Explanations Increase the Risk of Decision Logic Leakage? Explanation-Guided Stealing of Graph Models

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become essential tools for analyzing graph-structured data in domains such as drug discovery and financial analysis, leading to a growing demand for model transparency. Recent advances in explainable GNNs have addressed this need by revealing important subgraphs that influence predictions, but these explanation mechanisms may inadvertently expose these models to security risks. This paper investigates how such explanations potentially leak critical decision logic that can be exploited for model stealing. We propose EGSteal, a novel stealing framework that integrates explanation alignment for capturing decision logic with guided data augmentation for efficient training under limited queries, enabling effective replication of both the predictive behavior and underlying reasoning patterns of target models. Experiments on molecular graph datasets demonstrate that our approach shows advantages over conventional methods in model stealing. This work highlights important security considerations for the deployment of explainable GNNs in sensitive domains and suggests the need for protective measures against explanation-based attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/beanmah/EGSteal.