Dzung Pham (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Shreyas Kulkarni (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Amir Houmansadr (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Federated learning has emerged as a promising privacy-preserving solution for machine learning domains that rely on user interactions, particularly recommender systems and online learning to rank. While there has been substantial research on the privacy of traditional federated learning, little attention has been paid to the privacy properties of these interaction-based settings. In this work, we show that users face an elevated risk of having their private interactions reconstructed by the central server when the server can control the training features of the items that users interact with. We introduce RAIFLE, a novel optimization-based attack framework where the server actively manipulates the features of the items presented to users to increase the success rate of reconstruction. Our experiments with federated recommendation and online learning-to-rank scenarios demonstrate that RAIFLE is significantly more powerful than existing reconstruction attacks like gradient inversion, achieving high performance consistently in most settings. We discuss the pros and cons of several possible countermeasures to defend against RAIFLE in the context of interaction-based federated learning. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/dzungvpham/raifle.

View More Papers

Securing BGP ASAP: ASPA and other Post-ROV Defenses

Justin Furuness (University of Connecticut), Cameron Morris (University of Connecticut), Reynaldo Morillo (University of Connecticut), Arvind Kasiliya (University of Connecticut), Bing Wang (University of Connecticut), Amir Herzberg (University of Connecticut)

Read More

Five Word Password Composition Policy

Sirvan Almasi (Imperial College London), William J. Knottenbelt (Imperial College London)

Read More

JBomAudit: Assessing the Landscape, Compliance, and Security Implications of...

Yue Xiao (IBM Research), Dhilung Kirat (IBM Research), Douglas Lee Schales (IBM Research), Jiyong Jang (IBM Research), Luyi Xing (Indiana University Bloomington), Xiaojing Liao (Indiana University)

Read More

MALintent: Coverage Guided Intent Fuzzing Framework for Android

Ammar Askar (Georgia Institute of Technology), Fabian Fleischer (Georgia Institute of Technology), Christopher Kruegel (University of California, Santa Barbara), Giovanni Vigna (University of California, Santa Barbara), Taesoo Kim (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Read More