English

Efficient passive membership inference attack in federated learning

Machine Learning 2021-11-02 v1 Cryptography and Security Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

Abstract

In cross-device federated learning (FL) setting, clients such as mobiles cooperate with the server to train a global machine learning model, while maintaining their data locally. However, recent work shows that client's private information can still be disclosed to an adversary who just eavesdrops the messages exchanged between the client and the server. For example, the adversary can infer whether the client owns a specific data instance, which is called a passive membership inference attack. In this paper, we propose a new passive inference attack that requires much less computation power and memory than existing methods. Our empirical results show that our attack achieves a higher accuracy on CIFAR100 dataset (more than 44 percentage points) with three orders of magnitude less memory space and five orders of magnitude less calculations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.00430,
  title  = {Efficient passive membership inference attack in federated learning},
  author = {Oualid Zari and Chuan Xu and Giovanni Neglia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.00430},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted as a poster in NeurIPS 2021 PriML workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:19:35.911Z