Evaluating Membership Inference Attacks and Defenses in Federated
  Learning
Gongxi Zhu Donghao Li Hanlin Gu Yuxing Han Yuan Yao Lixin Fan Qiang Yang
Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) pose a growing threat to privacy
preservation in federated learning. The semi-honest attacker, e.g., the server,
may determine whether a particular sample belongs to a target client according
to the observed model information. This paper conducts an evaluation of
existing MIAs and corresponding defense strategies. Our evaluation on MIAs
reveals two important findings about the trend of MIAs. Firstly, combining
model information from multiple communication rounds (Multi-temporal) enhances
the overall effectiveness of MIAs compared to utilizing model information from
a single epoch. Secondly, incorporating models from non-target clients
(Multi-spatial) significantly improves the effectiveness of MIAs, particularly
when the clients' data is homogeneous. This highlights the importance of
considering the temporal and spatial model information in MIAs. Next, we assess
the effectiveness via privacy-utility tradeoff for two type defense mechanisms
against MIAs: Gradient Perturbation and Data Replacement. Our results
demonstrate that Data Replacement mechanisms achieve a more optimal balance
between preserving privacy and maintaining model utility. Therefore, we
recommend the adoption of Data Replacement methods as a defense strategy
against MIAs. Our code is available in https://github.com/Liar-Mask/FedMIA.