Extending the Scope of Gradient Reconstruction Attacks in Federated Averaging - CEA - Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives
Conference Papers Year : 2024

Extending the Scope of Gradient Reconstruction Attacks in Federated Averaging

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) has gained prominence as a decentralized and privacy-preserving paradigm that enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model under the supervision of a central server. Instead of centralizing the data, clients keep their data locally and share only model parameters during multiple communication rounds. However, recent attacks, such as gradient reconstruction attacks (GRAs) show privacy issues when an attacker knows the communication of a client. In the literature, these privacy issues are mainly explored when clients compute new parameters using a single gradient descent step on their data (FedSGD) and then send them back to the remote server. In a more realistic scenario, the clients' protocol is based on several gradient descent steps (FedAvg). This protocol adds intermediate computation steps, which are unknown from the attacker, thus making GRAs less successful. In this incremental paper, we conduct exhaustive experiments on four state-of-the-art attacks under the FedAvg protocol, on a very basic and a more complex neural network (ResNet-18) with CIFAR100 dataset. These experiments provide the following results 1) a privacy-utility trade-off analysis, 2) insights on the choice of attacks' hyperparameters, 3) the client's local learning rate has little impact on attacks' effectiveness 4) a proof that the privacy risk is not necessarily decreasing over rounds, contrary to common belief.
Embargoed file
Embargoed file
0 8 20
Year Month Jours
Avant la publication
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Embargoed file
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Please log in to request access to the document

Dates and versions

cea-04690658 , version 1 (06-09-2024)

Identifiers

Cite

Pierre Jobic, Aurélien Mayoue, Sara Tucci Piergiovanni, Francois Terrier. Extending the Scope of Gradient Reconstruction Attacks in Federated Averaging. 12th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security, Jun 2024, Baiona, Spain. pp.235-246, ⟨10.1145/3658664.3659636⟩. ⟨cea-04690658⟩
69 View
2 Download

Altmetric

Share

More