Cited by 66Privacy-Preserving Technologies in DataAdversarial Robustness in Machine LearningSecurity and Verification in Computing

Hard to Forget: Poisoning Attacks on Certified Machine Unlearning

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Marchant, Neil G., Rubinstein, Benjamin I. P., Alfeld, Scott·2022·Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The right to erasure requires removal of a user's information from data held by organizations, with rigorous interpretations extending to downstream products such as learned models. Retraining from scratch with the particular user's data omitted fully removes its influence on the resulting model, but comes with a high computational cost. Machine "unlearning" mitigates the cost incurred by full retraining: instead, models are updated incrementally, possibly only requiring retraining when approximation errors accumulate. Rapid progress has been made towards privacy guarantees on the indistinguishability of unlearned and retrained models, but current formalisms do not place practical bounds on computation. In this paper we demonstrate how an attacker can exploit this oversight, highlighting a novel attack surface introduced by machine unlearning. We consider an attacker aiming to increase the computational cost of data removal. We derive and empirically investigate a poisoning attack on certified machine unlearning where strategically designed training data triggers complete retraining when removed.

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  • A membership inference attack or a poisoning attack would reveal a significant amount of detailed information about the unlearned samples.

    “Thus, a membership inference attack or a poisoning attack would reveal a significant amount of detailed information about the unlearned samples [78, 108].”

    From Machine Unlearning: A Survey (2024) · cites this paper as [108]

    The Abstract (p. 1) and Related Work (p. 7) describe this paper’s poisoning attack as increasing the computational cost of unlearning, not revealing information about erased samples. Related Work mentions privacy vulnerabilities involving differencing attacks, but does not say that membership inference or poisoning reveals detailed information about unlearned samples. I searched for membership inference and privacy leakage from poisoning attacks. (LLM, conf=0.76)

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Huang, W. R.; Geiping, J.; Fowl, L.; Taylor, G.; and Goldstein, T. 2020. MetaPoison: Practical General-purpose Cleanlabel Data Poisoning. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume 33, 12080-12091.
  2. Marchant, N. G.; Rubinstein, B. I. P.; and Alfeld, S. 2021. Hard to Forget: Poisoning Attacks on Certified Machine Unlearning. arXiv:2109.08266. · arXiv
  3. Neel, S.; Roth, A.; and Sharifi-Malvajerdi, S. 2021. Descentto-Delete: Gradient-Based Methods for Machine Unlearning. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory , volume 132, 931-962.

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Authors
Marchant, N. G., Rubinstein, B. I. P., & Alfeld, S.
Affiliations
  • The University of Melbourne (AU)
  • Amherst College (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Published
2022-06-28
Volume
36
Issue
7
Pages
7691-7700
ISSN
  • 2159-5399 (ISSN-L)
  • 2374-3468
OpenAlex
W3199974954
Cited by
64
References
58
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 2
FWCI
8.00
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • AAAI Publications (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (DATA61)
  • Department of Defence, Australian Government
  • University of Melbourne (LE170100200)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Security and Verification in Computing
Keywords
machine unlearning, poisoning attacks, right to be forgotten, data deletion, privacy guarantees

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