Membership Inference Attacks Against Sequential Recommender Systems

Recent studies have demonstrated the vulnerability of recommender systems to membership inference attacks, which determine whether a user’s historical data was utilized for model training, posing serious privacy leakage issues. Existing works assumed that member and non-member users follow different recommendation modes, and then infer membership based on the difference vector between the user’s historical behaviors and the recommendation list. The previous frameworks are invalid against inductive recommendations, such as sequential recommendations, since the disparities of difference vectors constructed by the recommendations between members and non-members become imperceptible. This motivates us to dig deeper into the target model. In addition, most MIA frameworks assume that they can obtain some in-distribution data from the same distribution of the target data, which is hard to gain in recommender system.