TEAR: Exploring Temporal Evolution of Adversarial Robustness for Membership Inference Attacks Against Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm that enables multiple clients to train a unified model without disclosing their private data. However, susceptibility to membership inference attacks (MIAs) arises due to the natural inclination of FL models to overfit on the training data during the training process, thereby enabling MIAs to exploit the subtle differences in the FL model’s parameters, activations, or predictions between the training and testing data to infer membership information. It is worth noting that most if not all existing MIAs against FL require access to the model’s internal information or modification of the training process, yielding them unlikely to be performed in practice. In this paper, we present with TEAR the first evidence that it is possible for an honest-but-curious federated client to perform MIA against an FL system, by exploring the Temporal Evolution of the Adversarial Robustness between the training and non-training data. We design a novel adversarial example generation method to quantify the target sample’s adversarial robustness, which can be utilized to obtain the membership features to train the inference model in a supervised manner. Extensive experiment results on five realistic datasets demonstrate that TEAR can achieve a strong inference performance compared with two existing MIAs, and is able to escape from the protection of two representative defenses.