Feature Inference Attack on Shapley Values

As a solution concept in cooperative game theory, Shapley value is highly recognized in model interpretability studies and widely adopted by the leading Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) providers, such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM. However, as the Shapley value-based model interpretability methods have been thoroughly studied, few researchers consider the privacy risks incurred by Shapley values, despite that interpretability and privacy are two foundations of machine learning (ML) models. In this paper, we investigate the privacy risks of Shapley value-based model interpretability methods using feature inference attacks: reconstructing the private model inputs based on their Shapley value explanations. Specifically, we present two adversaries. The first adversary can reconstruct the private inputs by training an attack model based on an auxiliary dataset and black-box access to the model interpretability services. The second adversary, even without any background knowledge, can successfully reconstruct most of the private features by exploiting the local linear correlations between the model inputs and outputs. We perform the proposed attacks on the leading MLaaS platforms, i.e., Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM aix360. The experimental results demonstrate the vulnerability of the state-of-the-art Shapley value-based model interpretability methods used in the leading MLaaS platforms and highlight the significance and necessity of designing privacy-preserving model interpretability methods in future studies. To our best knowledge, this is also the first work that investigates the privacy risks of Shapley values.

Exploring Privacy and Fairness Risks in Sharing Diffusion Models: An Adversarial Perspective

Diffusion models have recently gained significant attention in both academia and industry due to their impressive generative performance in terms of both sampling quality and distribution coverage. Accordingly, proposals are made for sharing pre-trained diffusion models across different organizations, as a way of improving data utilization while enhancing privacy protection by avoiding sharing private data directly. However, the potential risks associated with such an approach have not been comprehensively examined. In this paper, we take an adversarial perspective to investigate the potential privacy and fairness risks associated with the sharing of diffusion models. Specifically, we investigate the circumstances in which one party (the sharer) trains a diffusion model using private data and provides another party (the receiver) black-box access to the pre-trained model for downstream tasks. We demonstrate that the sharer can execute fairness poisoning attacks to undermine the receiver's downstream models by manipulating the training data distribution of the diffusion model. Meanwhile, the receiver can perform property inference attacks to reveal the distribution of sensitive features in the sharer's dataset. Our experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate remarkable attack performance on different types of diffusion models, which highlights the critical importance of robust data auditing and privacy protection protocols in pertinent applications.

Passive Inference Attacks on Split Learning via Adversarial Regularization

Split Learning (SL) has emerged as a practical and efficient alternative to traditional federated learning. While previous attempts to attack SL have often relied on overly strong assumptions or targeted easily exploitable models, we seek to develop more practical attacks. We introduce SDAR, a novel attack framework against SL with an honest-but-curious server. SDAR leverages auxiliary data and adversarial regularization to learn a decodable simulator of the client's private model, which can effectively infer the client's private features under the vanilla SL, and both features and labels under the U-shaped SL. We perform extensive experiments in both configurations to validate the effectiveness of our proposed attacks. Notably, in challenging but practical scenarios where existing passive attacks struggle to reconstruct the client's private data effectively, SDAR consistently achieves attack performance comparable to active attacks. On CIFAR-10, at the deep split level of 7, SDAR achieves private feature reconstruction with less than 0.025 mean squared error in both the vanilla and the U-shaped SL, and attains a label inference accuracy of over 98% in the U-shaped setting, while existing attacks fail to produce non-trivial results.