Cited by 311Adversarial Robustness in Machine LearningPrivacy-Preserving Technologies in DataDigital Media Forensic Detection

GAN-Leaks: A Taxonomy of Membership Inference Attacks against Generative Models

Open access
Chen, Dingfan, Yu, Ning, Zhang, Yang, Fritz, Mario·2020·Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Abstract

Deep learning has achieved overwhelming success, spanning from discriminative models to generative models. In particular, deep generative models have facilitated a new level of performance in a myriad of areas, ranging from media manipulation to sanitized dataset generation. Despite the great success, the potential risks of privacy breach caused by generative models have not been analyzed systematically. In this paper, we focus on membership inference attack against deep generative models that reveals information about the training data used for victim models. Specifically, we present the first taxonomy of membership inference attacks, encompassing not only existing attacks but also our novel ones. In addition, we propose the first generic attack model that can be instantiated in a large range of settings and is applicable to various kinds of deep generative models. Moreover, we provide a theoretically grounded attack calibration technique, which consistently boosts the attack performance in all cases, across different attack settings, data modalities, and training configurations. We complement the systematic analysis of attack performance by a comprehensive experimental study, that investigates the effectiveness of various attacks w.r.t. model type and training configurations, over three diverse application scenarios (i.e., images, medical data, and location data).

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3372297.3417238

Cites

108 of 108 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Membership inference is the most well-established privacy attack and arguably constitutes a bigger privacy threat than class-level attacks, such as the attacks in [7, 59] and model inversion [18, 19].

    “We emphasize that membership inference is the most wellestablished privacy attack and arguably constitutes a bigger privacy threat [13,28,30,37,46,48,60,66,67,75] than classlevel attacks, such as the attacks in [7, 59] and model inversion [18, 19].”

    From When Machine Unlearning Jeopardizes Privacy (2021) · cites this paper as [13]

    The Introduction (p. 1) identifies membership inference as a privacy attack that can expose whether a person's record was used in training, and the Abstract (p. 1) describes a taxonomy encompassing existing attacks. These passages support treating it as an established privacy concern, but the paper does not say it is the most well-established attack or compare its threat with class-level attacks or model inversion. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Deep-faked patient face images could violate patient privacy and lead to the leakage or exploitation of protected health information.

    “Deep-faked patient face images could violate patient privacy and lead to the leakage or exploitation of PHI [75].”

    From Generative AI in medical practice: in-depth exploration of privacy and security challenges (2024) · cites this paper as [75]

    The Introduction (p. 1) says membership inference against GANs used with health records or medical images may reveal a patient’s disease history. The Setup (p. 7) treats face images and patient records as separate datasets. The paper supports a risk of patient-data leakage, but does not address deep-faked patient faces specifically or exploitation of protected health information. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. [9][9] Oren Boiman, Eli Shechtman, and Michal Irani. 2008. In Defense of NearestNeighbor based Image Classification. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) . IEEE. -
  2. [33][33] Jinyuan Jia, Ahmed Salem, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong. 2019. MemGuard: Defending against Black-Box Membership Inference Attacks via Adversarial Examples. In ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) . ACM, 259-274. -
  3. [40][40] Diederik P. Kingma and Prafulla Dhariwal. 2018. Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions. In Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) . NeurIPS, 10236-10245. -
  4. [59][59] Tim Salimans, Ian J. Goodfellow, Wojciech Zaremba, Vicki Cheung, Alec Radford, and Xi Chen. 2016. Improved Techniques for Training GANs. In Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) . NIPS, 2226-2234. -
  5. [63][63] Tijmen Tieleman and Geoffrey Hinton. 2012. Lecture 6.5-rmsprop: Divide the Gradient by a Running average of its Recent Magnitude. COURSERA: Neural Networks for Machine Learning 4, 2 (2012), 26-31. -

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Chen, D., Yu, N., Zhang, Y., & Fritz, M.
Affiliations
  • Helmholtz Center for Information Security (DE)
  • Max Planck Institute for Informatics (DE)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Publisher
ACM
Published
2020-10-30
Pages
343-362
ISSN
1543-7221 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3071470454
Cited by
311
References
108
Citations by year
2026: 30 · 2025: 50 · 2024: 60 · 2023: 63 · 2022: 48 · 2021: 44 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 2
FWCI
16.12
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
  • CISPA Helmholtz Center
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Digital Media Forensic Detection
Keywords
membership inference attacks, generative models, privacy leakage, training data privacy, attack taxonomy, deep generative models, medical data privacy, location privacy

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review