RobPI: Robust Private Inference against Malicious Client

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xue, Jiaqi, Zheng, Mengxin, Lou, Qian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Xue, Jiaqi
Zheng, Mengxin
Lou, Qian
author_facet Xue, Jiaqi
Zheng, Mengxin
Lou, Qian
contents The increased deployment of machine learning inference in various applications has sparked privacy concerns. In response, private inference (PI) protocols have been created to allow parties to perform inference without revealing their sensitive data. Despite recent advances in the efficiency of PI, most current methods assume a semi-honest threat model where the data owner is honest and adheres to the protocol. However, in reality, data owners can have different motivations and act in unpredictable ways, making this assumption unrealistic. To demonstrate how a malicious client can compromise the semi-honest model, we first designed an inference manipulation attack against a range of state-of-the-art private inference protocols. This attack allows a malicious client to modify the model output with 3x to 8x fewer queries than current black-box attacks. Motivated by the attacks, we proposed and implemented RobPI, a robust and resilient private inference protocol that withstands malicious clients. RobPI integrates a distinctive cryptographic protocol that bolsters security by weaving encryption-compatible noise into the logits and features of private inference, thereby efficiently warding off malicious-client attacks. Our extensive experiments on various neural networks and datasets show that RobPI achieves ~91.9% attack success rate reduction and increases more than 10x the number of queries required by malicious-client attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_19918
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RobPI: Robust Private Inference against Malicious Client
Xue, Jiaqi
Zheng, Mengxin
Lou, Qian
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
The increased deployment of machine learning inference in various applications has sparked privacy concerns. In response, private inference (PI) protocols have been created to allow parties to perform inference without revealing their sensitive data. Despite recent advances in the efficiency of PI, most current methods assume a semi-honest threat model where the data owner is honest and adheres to the protocol. However, in reality, data owners can have different motivations and act in unpredictable ways, making this assumption unrealistic. To demonstrate how a malicious client can compromise the semi-honest model, we first designed an inference manipulation attack against a range of state-of-the-art private inference protocols. This attack allows a malicious client to modify the model output with 3x to 8x fewer queries than current black-box attacks. Motivated by the attacks, we proposed and implemented RobPI, a robust and resilient private inference protocol that withstands malicious clients. RobPI integrates a distinctive cryptographic protocol that bolsters security by weaving encryption-compatible noise into the logits and features of private inference, thereby efficiently warding off malicious-client attacks. Our extensive experiments on various neural networks and datasets show that RobPI achieves ~91.9% attack success rate reduction and increases more than 10x the number of queries required by malicious-client attacks.
title RobPI: Robust Private Inference against Malicious Client
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19918