Comparative Analysis of Membership Inference Attacks in Federated and Centralized Learning

Abstract

The vulnerability of machine learning models to membership inference attacks, which aim to determine whether a specific record belongs to the training dataset, is explored in this paper. Federated learning allows multiple parties to independently train a model without sharing or centralizing their data, offering privacy advantages. However, when private datasets are used in federated learning and model access is granted, the risk of membership inference attacks emerges, potentially compromising sensitive data. To address this, effective defenses in a federated learning environment must be developed without compromising the utility of the target model. This study empirically investigates and compares membership inference attack methodologies in both federated and centralized learning environments, utilizing diverse optimizers and assessing attacks with and without defenses on image and tabular datasets. The findings demonstrate that a combination of knowledge distillation and conventional mitigation techniques (such as Gaussian dropout, Gaussian noise, and activity regularization) significantly mitigates the risk of information leakage in both federated and centralized settings.