Exposing the Vulnerability of Decentralized Learning to Membership Inference Attacks Through the Lens of Graph Mixing

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Main Authors: Touat, Ousmane, Brunon, Jezekael, Belal, Yacine, Nicolas, Julien, Sabater, César, Maouche, Mohamed, Mokhtar, Sonia Ben
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Touat, Ousmane
Brunon, Jezekael
Belal, Yacine
Nicolas, Julien
Sabater, César
Maouche, Mohamed
Mokhtar, Sonia Ben
author_facet Touat, Ousmane
Brunon, Jezekael
Belal, Yacine
Nicolas, Julien
Sabater, César
Maouche, Mohamed
Mokhtar, Sonia Ben
contents The primary promise of decentralized learning is to allow users to engage in the training of machine learning models in a collaborative manner while keeping their data on their premises and without relying on any central entity. However, this paradigm necessitates the exchange of model parameters or gradients between peers. Such exchanges can be exploited to infer sensitive information about training data, which is achieved through privacy attacks (e.g., Membership Inference Attacks -- MIA). In order to devise effective defense mechanisms, it is important to understand the factors that increase/reduce the vulnerability of a given decentralized learning architecture to MIA. In this study, we extensively explore the vulnerability to MIA of various decentralized learning architectures by varying the graph structure (e.g., number of neighbors), the graph dynamics, and the aggregation strategy, across diverse datasets and data distributions. Our key finding, which to the best of our knowledge we are the first to report, is that the vulnerability to MIA is heavily correlated to (i) the local model mixing strategy performed by each node upon reception of models from neighboring nodes and (ii) the global mixing properties of the communication graph. We illustrate these results experimentally using four datasets and by theoretically analyzing the mixing properties of various decentralized architectures. We also empirically show that enhancing mixing properties is highly beneficial when combined with other privacy-preserving techniques such as Differential Privacy. Our paper draws a set of lessons learned for devising decentralized learning systems that reduce by design the vulnerability to MIA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_12837
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exposing the Vulnerability of Decentralized Learning to Membership Inference Attacks Through the Lens of Graph Mixing
Touat, Ousmane
Brunon, Jezekael
Belal, Yacine
Nicolas, Julien
Sabater, César
Maouche, Mohamed
Mokhtar, Sonia Ben
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The primary promise of decentralized learning is to allow users to engage in the training of machine learning models in a collaborative manner while keeping their data on their premises and without relying on any central entity. However, this paradigm necessitates the exchange of model parameters or gradients between peers. Such exchanges can be exploited to infer sensitive information about training data, which is achieved through privacy attacks (e.g., Membership Inference Attacks -- MIA). In order to devise effective defense mechanisms, it is important to understand the factors that increase/reduce the vulnerability of a given decentralized learning architecture to MIA. In this study, we extensively explore the vulnerability to MIA of various decentralized learning architectures by varying the graph structure (e.g., number of neighbors), the graph dynamics, and the aggregation strategy, across diverse datasets and data distributions. Our key finding, which to the best of our knowledge we are the first to report, is that the vulnerability to MIA is heavily correlated to (i) the local model mixing strategy performed by each node upon reception of models from neighboring nodes and (ii) the global mixing properties of the communication graph. We illustrate these results experimentally using four datasets and by theoretically analyzing the mixing properties of various decentralized architectures. We also empirically show that enhancing mixing properties is highly beneficial when combined with other privacy-preserving techniques such as Differential Privacy. Our paper draws a set of lessons learned for devising decentralized learning systems that reduce by design the vulnerability to MIA.
title Exposing the Vulnerability of Decentralized Learning to Membership Inference Attacks Through the Lens of Graph Mixing
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12837