CGIR: Conditional Generative Instance Reconstruction Attacks against Federated Learning

• Published in: IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing Vol. 20; no. 6; pp. 1 - 13
• Main Authors: Xu, Xiangrui, Liu, Pengrui, Wang, Wei, Ma, Hong-Liang, Wang, Bin, Han, Zhen, Han, Yufei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington IEEE 01.11.2023; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Data privacy; Data Reconstruction Attacks; Datasets; Federated Learning; Generators; Image reconstruction; Labels; Optimization; Privacy; Servers; Training
• ISSN: 1545-5971; 1941-0018
• DOI: 10.1109/TDSC.2022.3228302

Data reconstruction attack has become an emerging privacy threat to Federal Learning (FL), inspiring a rethinking of FL's ability to protect privacy. While existing data reconstruction attacks have shown some effective performance, prior arts rely on different strong assumptions to guide the reconstruction process. In this work, we propose a novel Conditional Generative Instance Reconstruction Attack (CGIR attack) that drops all these assumptions. Specifically, we propose a batch label inference attack in non-IID FL scenarios, where multiple images can share the same labels. Based on the inferred labels, we conduct a "coarse-to-fine" image reconstruction process that provides a stable and effective data reconstruction. In addition, we equip the generator with a label condition restriction so that the contents and the labels of the reconstructed images are consistent. Our extensive evaluation results on two model architectures and five image datasets show that without the auxiliary assumptions, the CGIR attack outperforms the prior arts, even for complex datasets, deep models, and large batch sizes. Furthermore, we evaluate several existing defense methods. The experimental results suggest that pruning gradients can be used as a strategy to mitigate privacy risks in FL if a model tolerates a slight accuracy loss.