With the wide-spread application of machine learning models, it has become critical to study the potential data leakage of models trained on sensitive data. Recently, various membership inference (MI) attacks are proposed that determines if a sample was part of the training set or not. Although the first generation of MI attacks has been proven to be ineffective in practice, a few recent studies proposed practical MI attacks that achieve reasonable true positive rate at low false positive rate. The question is whether these attacks can be reliably used in practice. We showcase a practical application of membership inference attacks where it is used by an auditor (investigator) to prove to a judge/jury that an auditee unlawfully used sensitive data during training. Then, we show that the auditee can provide a dataset (with potentially unlimited number of samples) to a judge where MI attacks catastrophically fail. Hence, the auditee challenges the credibility of the auditor and can get the case dismissed. More importantly, we show that the auditee does not need to know anything about the MI attack neither a query access to it. In other words, all currently SOTA MI attacks in literature suffer from the same issue. Through comprehensive experimental evaluation, we show that our algorithms can increase the false positive rate from ten to thousands times larger than what auditor claim to the judge. Lastly, we argue that the implication of our algorithms is beyond discredibility: Current membership inference attacks can identify the memorized subpopulations, but they cannot reliably identify which exact sample in the subpopulation was used during training.

本文探讨了使用MI攻击来检测敏感数据泄露的问题，结果发现MI攻击容易被挑战其可靠性，并提出一种新的算法，将假阳性率提高至数千倍。

关于成员推断攻击的不信任