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

Understanding Miniapp Malware: Identification, Dissection, and Characterization

Yuqing Yang (The Ohio State University), Yue Zhang (Drexel University), Zhiqiang Lin (The Ohio State University)

Read More

I Know What You Asked: Prompt Leakage via KV-Cache...

Guanlong Wu (Southern University of Science and Technology), Zheng Zhang (ByteDance Inc.), Yao Zhang (ByteDance Inc.), Weili Wang (Southern University of Science and Technolog), Jianyu Niu (Southern University of Science and Technolog), Ye Wu (ByteDance Inc.), Yinqian Zhang (Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech))

Read More

CENSOR: Defense Against Gradient Inversion via Orthogonal Subspace Bayesian...

Kaiyuan Zhang (Purdue University), Siyuan Cheng (Purdue University), Guangyu Shen (Purdue University), Bruno Ribeiro (Purdue University), Shengwei An (Purdue University), Pin-Yu Chen (IBM Research AI), Xiangyu Zhang (Purdue University), Ninghui Li (Purdue 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