An Attack-Defense Game-Based Reinforcement Learning Privacy-Preserving Method Against Inference Attack in Double Auction Market

Auction mechanism, as a fair and efficient resource allocation method, has been widely used in varieties trading scenarios, such as advertising, crowdsensoring and spectrum. However, in addition to obtaining higher profits and satisfaction, the privacy concerns have attracted researchers’ attention. In this paper, we mainly study the privacy preserving issue in the double auction market against the indirect inference attack. Most of the existing works apply differential privacy theory to defend against the inference attack, but there exists two problems. First, ‘indistinguishability’ of differential privacy (DP) cannot prevent the disclosure of continuous valuations in the auction market. Second, the privacy-utility trade-off (PUT) in differential privacy deployment has not been resolved. To this end, we proposed an attack-defense game-based reinforcement learning privacy-preserving method to provide practically privacy protection in double auction. First, the auctioneer acts as defender, adds noise to the bidders’ valuations, and then acts as adversary to launch inference attack. After that the auctioneer uses the attack results and auction results as a reference to guide the next deployment. The above process can be regarded as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The state is the valuations of each bidders under the current steps. The action is the noise added to each bidders. The reward is composed of privacy, utility and training speed, in which attack success rate and social welfare are taken as measures of privacy and utility, a delay penalty term is used to reduce the training time. Utilizing the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm, we establish an actor-critic network to solve the problem of MDP. Finally, we conducted extensive evaluations to verify the performance of our proposed method. The results show that compared with other existing DP-based double auction privacy preserving mechanisms, our method can achieve better results in both privacy and utility. We can reduce the attack success rate from nearly 100% to less than 20%, and the utility deviation is less than 5%. Note to Practitioners—Privacy protection in trading markets, such as advertising, crowdsensing, and spectrum, is crucial. Traditional approaches like differential privacy have been unable to entirely guard sensitive data against inference attacks. To address this, we introduce a novel privacy-preserving mechanism for double auction markets. Our approach employs an attack-defense game model, where noise is added to bidders’ valuations and then used to launch an inference attack. This process allows for the evaluation of the noise’s effectiveness and iteratively refines the privacy protection method. Transformed into a reinforcement learning model and optimized through a DDPG network, our mechanism reduces computational complexity. It has been shown to significantly diminish the success rate of inference attacks, while maintaining a minimal utility deviation. Practitioners in auction-based markets can leverage our approach to enhance privacy protection without negatively impacting market performance. By integrating our mechanism into their operations, auctioneers can foster a safer and more efficient trading environment.