Privacy Leakage of Real-World Vertical Federated Learning

Federated learning enables mutually distrusting participants to collaboratively learn a distributed machine learning model without revealing anything but the model's output. Generic federated learning has been studied extensively, and several learning protocols, as well as open-source frameworks, have been developed. Yet, their over pursuit of computing efficiency and fast implementation might diminish the security and privacy guarantees of participant's training data, about which little is known thus far. In this paper, we consider an honest-but-curious adversary who participants in training a distributed ML model, does not deviate from the defined learning protocol, but attempts to infer private training data from the legitimately received information. In this setting, we design and implement two practical attacks, reverse sum attack and reverse multiplication attack, neither of which will affect the accuracy of the learned model. By empirically studying the privacy leakage of two learning protocols, we show that our attacks are (1) effective - the adversary successfully steal the private training data, even when the intermediate outputs are encrypted to protect data privacy; (2) evasive - the adversary's malicious behavior does not deviate from the protocol specification and deteriorate any accuracy of the target model; and (3) easy - the adversary needs little prior knowledge about the data distribution of the target participant. We also experimentally show that the leaked information is as effective as the raw training data through training an alternative classifier on the leaked information. We further discuss potential countermeasures and their challenges, which we hope may lead to several promising research directions.