arXiv:2603.03777cs.LG2026-03

提出无需辅助数据的标签枚举攻击,可跨场景破解垂直联邦学习隐私。

LEA: Label Enumeration Attack in Vertical Federated Learning

  • 通过聚类枚举样本与标签映射,用梯度相似性验证正确性。
  • 首次实现无辅助数据、跨场景的标签泄露,攻击成功率超90%。
  • 适合研究联邦学习安全的学者,或设计防御方案的工程师。

典型的垂直联邦学习(VFL)场景中,多个参与方共同训练模型,每方拥有相同样本的不同特征,标签仅由一方持有。由于标签包含敏感信息,VFL需保障其隐私。然而,现有针对VFL的标签推断攻击要么局限于特定场景,要么依赖辅助数据,在实际应用中不实用。本文提出一种新型标签枚举攻击(LEA),首次实现跨多种VFL场景的适用性且无需辅助数据。核心思路是:攻击者利用聚类枚举样本与标签的可能映射关系,并通过比较良性模型与每种映射下模拟模型的相似性来确定正确映射。为解决模型相似性度量难题,我们提出基于首轮损失梯度余弦相似性的高效评估方法,比参数比较更精准高效。此外,针对枚举生成大量模拟模型带来的高计算开销,提出Binary-LEA,将枚举数量从n!降至n³。LEA对梯度噪声和梯度压缩等常见防御手段具有鲁棒性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

A typical Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) scenario involves several participants collaboratively training a machine learning model, where each party has different features for the same samples, with labels held exclusively by one party. Since labels contain sensitive information, VFL must ensure the privacy of labels. However, existing VFL-targeted label inference attacks are either limited to specific scenarios or require auxiliary data, rendering them impractical in real-world applications. We introduce a novel Label Enumeration Attack (LEA) that, for the first time, achieves applicability across multiple VFL scenarios and eschews the need for auxiliary data. Our intuition is that an adversary, employing clustering to enumerate mappings between samples and labels, ascertains the accurate label mappings by evaluating the similarity between the benign model and the simulated models trained under each mapping. To achieve that, the first challenge is how to measure model similarity, as models trained on the same data can have different weights. Drawing from our findings, we propose an efficient approach for assessing congruence based on the cosine similarity of the first-round loss gradients, which offers superior efficiency and precision compared to the comparison of parameter similarities. However, the computational cost may be prohibitive due to the necessity of training and comparing the vast number of simulated models generated through enumeration. To overcome this challenge, we propose Binary-LEA from the perspective of reducing the number of models and eliminating futile training, which lowers the number of enumerations from n! to n^3. Moreover, LEA is resilient against common defense mechanisms such as gradient noise and gradient compression.

联邦学习隐私攻击标签泄露

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