Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Hangtao, Yao, Zeming, Zhang, Leo Yu, Hu, Shengshan, Chen, Chao, Liew, Alan, Li, Zhetao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10783
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909326582480896
author Zhang, Hangtao
Yao, Zeming
Zhang, Leo Yu
Hu, Shengshan
Chen, Chao
Liew, Alan
Li, Zhetao
author_facet Zhang, Hangtao
Yao, Zeming
Zhang, Leo Yu
Hu, Shengshan
Chen, Chao
Liew, Alan
Li, Zhetao
contents Federated learning (FL) is vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where adversaries corrupt the global aggregation results and cause denial-of-service (DoS). Unlike recent model poisoning attacks that optimize the amplitude of malicious perturbations along certain prescribed directions to cause DoS, we propose a Flexible Model Poisoning Attack (FMPA) that can achieve versatile attack goals. We consider a practical threat scenario where no extra knowledge about the FL system (e.g., aggregation rules or updates on benign devices) is available to adversaries. FMPA exploits the global historical information to construct an estimator that predicts the next round of the global model as a benign reference. It then fine-tunes the reference model to obtain the desired poisoned model with low accuracy and small perturbations. Besides the goal of causing DoS, FMPA can be naturally extended to launch a fine-grained controllable attack, making it possible to precisely reduce the global accuracy. Armed with precise control, malicious FL service providers can gain advantages over their competitors without getting noticed, hence opening a new attack surface in FL other than DoS. Even for the purpose of DoS, experiments show that FMPA significantly decreases the global accuracy, outperforming six state-of-the-art attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2304_10783
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Denial-of-Service or Fine-Grained Control: Towards Flexible Model Poisoning Attacks on Federated Learning
Zhang, Hangtao
Yao, Zeming
Zhang, Leo Yu
Hu, Shengshan
Chen, Chao
Liew, Alan
Li, Zhetao
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Federated learning (FL) is vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where adversaries corrupt the global aggregation results and cause denial-of-service (DoS). Unlike recent model poisoning attacks that optimize the amplitude of malicious perturbations along certain prescribed directions to cause DoS, we propose a Flexible Model Poisoning Attack (FMPA) that can achieve versatile attack goals. We consider a practical threat scenario where no extra knowledge about the FL system (e.g., aggregation rules or updates on benign devices) is available to adversaries. FMPA exploits the global historical information to construct an estimator that predicts the next round of the global model as a benign reference. It then fine-tunes the reference model to obtain the desired poisoned model with low accuracy and small perturbations. Besides the goal of causing DoS, FMPA can be naturally extended to launch a fine-grained controllable attack, making it possible to precisely reduce the global accuracy. Armed with precise control, malicious FL service providers can gain advantages over their competitors without getting noticed, hence opening a new attack surface in FL other than DoS. Even for the purpose of DoS, experiments show that FMPA significantly decreases the global accuracy, outperforming six state-of-the-art attacks.
title Denial-of-Service or Fine-Grained Control: Towards Flexible Model Poisoning Attacks on Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10783