Proposal: migrate from TF to ONNX

[Alex Sokol]

Propose to migrate model from TF to ONNX ML libraries

https://onnx.ai/ - "ONNX is an open format built to represent machine learning models."
This lib allows to run ml models on a different platforms, but not training them

Motivation:

• tf i a big library that allows to train models. credsweeper code only execute models, not training them
• tf is slow to load: on linux with Core-I9 it takes 1s, on windows os it might take up to 9s on the same hardware (details below)
• we have problems with tf changing interface or having vulnerabilities every few months
• current tf pypi weights "438.0 MB" ( https://pypi.org/project/tensorflow/#files )
• current onnx+onnxruntime pypi weights ~17MB in total (https://pypi.org/project/onnxruntime/#files, https://pypi.org/project/onnx/#files)

Migration from TF to ONNX usually require simple model conversion process: https://onnxruntime.ai/docs/tutorials/tf-get-started.html#converting-a-model

Other than that we would need to update code that directly utilize tensorflow functions

---

CredSweeper exec time with tf imports:

$ time python -m credsweeper --ml_validation --path tests/samples/password -j 1

real    0m4,487s
user    0m4,182s
sys     0m2,635s

And without them (--ml_validation also removed due to it currently depends ion tf):

$ time python -m credsweeper --path tests/samples/password -j 1

real    0m0,440s
user    0m0,400s
sys     0m0,045s

Example import time for tf and onnx:

$ time python -c "import tensorflow"

real    0m1,198s
user    0m1,464s
sys     0m1,814s

$ time python -c "import onnx"

real    0m0,098s
user    0m0,219s
sys     0m0,707s