GraphIP–Bench: How Hard Is It to Steal a Graph Neural Network, and Can We Stop It?

Graph neural networks (GNNs) deployed as cloud services can be stolen through model-extraction attacks, which train a surrogate from query responses to reproduce the target's behaviour, and a growing line of ownership defenses tries to prevent or trace such theft. The title of this paper asks two questions: how hard is it to steal a GNN?, and can we stop it? Prior work cannot answer either, because experiments use inconsistent datasets, threat models, and metrics. We introduce GraphIP-Bench, a unified benchmark which evaluates both sides under a single black-box protocol. It integrates twelve extraction attacks, twelve defenses spanning watermarking, output-perturbation, and query-pattern-detection families, ten public graphs covering homophilic, heterophilic, and large-scale regimes, three GNN backbones, and three graph-learning tasks, and it reports fidelity, task utility, ownership verification, and computational cost on shared splits, queries, and budgets. We further add a joint attack-and-defense track which runs every attack on every defended target and measures watermark verification on the resulting surrogate, which exposes the protection that a defense retains after extraction. The empirical picture is short: stealing a GNN is easy at medium query budgets and most defenses do not change this; several watermarks verify reliably on the protected model but lose most of their verification signal on the extracted surrogate, which exposes a gap that single-model evaluations miss; and heterophilic graphs are systematically harder to steal, while a cross-architecture mismatch between target and surrogate reduces but does not prevent extraction. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GraphIPBench-C641anonymous.4open.science/r/GraphIPBench-C641.