Property Inference from Poisoning

Property inference attacks consider an adversary who has access to a trained ML model and tries to extract some global statistics of the training data. In this work, we study property inference in scenarios where the adversary can maliciously control a part of the training data (poisoning data) with the goal of increasing the leakage. Previous works on poisoning attacks focused on trying to decrease the accuracy of models. Here, for the first time, we study poisoning attacks where the goal of the adversary is to increase the information leakage of the model. We show that poisoning attacks can boost the information leakage significantly and should be considered as a stronger threat model in sensitive applications where some of the data sources may be malicious.We theoretically prove that our attack can always succeed as long as the learning algorithm used has good generalization properties. Then we experimentally evaluate our on different datasets (Census dataset, Enron email dataset, MNIST and CelebA), properties (that are present in the training data as features, that are not present as features, and properties that are uncorrelated with the rest of the training data or classification task) and model architectures (including Resnet-18 and Resnet-50). We were able to achieve high attack accuracy with relatively low poisoning rate, namely, 2–3% poisoning in most of our experiments. We also evaluated our attacks on models trained with DP and we show that even with very small values for $\epsilon$, the attack is still quite successful1.1Code is available at https://github.com/smahloujifar/PropertyInferenceFromPoisoning.git