Active membership inference attack under local differential privacy in federated learning

T Nguyen, P Lai, K Tran, NH Phan, MT Thai - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2023 - arxiv.org
arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.12685, 2023arxiv.org
Federated learning (FL) was originally regarded as a framework for collaborative learning
among clients with data privacy protection through a coordinating server. In this paper, we
propose a new active membership inference (AMI) attack carried out by a dishonest server
in FL. In AMI attacks, the server crafts and embeds malicious parameters into global models
to effectively infer whether a target data sample is included in a client's private training data
or not. By exploiting the correlation among data features through a non-linear decision …
Federated learning (FL) was originally regarded as a framework for collaborative learning among clients with data privacy protection through a coordinating server. In this paper, we propose a new active membership inference (AMI) attack carried out by a dishonest server in FL. In AMI attacks, the server crafts and embeds malicious parameters into global models to effectively infer whether a target data sample is included in a client's private training data or not. By exploiting the correlation among data features through a non-linear decision boundary, AMI attacks with a certified guarantee of success can achieve severely high success rates under rigorous local differential privacy (LDP) protection; thereby exposing clients' training data to significant privacy risk. Theoretical and experimental results on several benchmark datasets show that adding sufficient privacy-preserving noise to prevent our attack would significantly damage FL's model utility.
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