Effective passive membership inference attacks in federated learning against overparameterized models![Download PDF](/images/pdf_icon_blue.svg)
Keywords: membership inference attack, federated learning, overparameterization, neural networks, image classification
TL;DR: The observation that gradients of large overparameterized neural networks that generalize well behave like high-dimensional independent isotropic random vectors, leads to a new class of passive membership inference attacks in federated learning.
Abstract: This work considers the challenge of performing membership inference attacks in a federated learning setting ---for image classification--- where an adversary can only observe the communication between the central node and a single client (a passive white-box attack). Passive attacks are one of the hardest-to-detect attacks, since they can be performed without modifying how the behavior of the central server or its clients, and assumes *no access to private data instances*. The key insight of our method is empirically observing that, near parameters that generalize well in test, the gradient of large overparameterized neural network models statistically behave like high-dimensional independent isotropic random vectors. Using this insight, we devise two attacks that are often little impacted by existing and proposed defenses. Finally, we validated the hypothesis that our attack depends on the overparametrization by showing that increasing the level of overparametrization (without changing the neural network architecture) positively correlates with our attack effectiveness.
Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors’ identity.
No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.
Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics
Submission Guidelines: Yes
Please Choose The Closest Area That Your Submission Falls Into: Deep Learning and representational learning
11 Replies
Loading