Paper ID: 2403.08284

MGIC: A Multi-Label Gradient Inversion Attack based on Canny Edge Detection on Federated Learning

Can Liu, Jin Wang

As a new distributed computing framework that can protect data privacy, federated learning (FL) has attracted more and more attention in recent years. It receives gradients from users to train the global model and releases the trained global model to working users. Nonetheless, the gradient inversion (GI) attack reflects the risk of privacy leakage in federated learning. Attackers only need to use gradients through hundreds of thousands of simple iterations to obtain relatively accurate private data stored on users' local devices. For this, some works propose simple but effective strategies to obtain user data under a single-label dataset. However, these strategies induce a satisfactory visual effect of the inversion image at the expense of higher time costs. Due to the semantic limitation of a single label, the image obtained by gradient inversion may have semantic errors. We present a novel gradient inversion strategy based on canny edge detection (MGIC) in both the multi-label and single-label datasets. To reduce semantic errors caused by a single label, we add new convolution layers' blocks in the trained model to obtain the image's multi-label. Through multi-label representation, serious semantic errors in inversion images are reduced. Then, we analyze the impact of parameters on the difficulty of input image reconstruction and discuss how image multi-subjects affect the inversion performance. Our proposed strategy has better visual inversion image results than the most widely used ones, saving more than 78% of time costs in the ImageNet dataset.

Submitted: Mar 13, 2024