2025/01/06 by Chao Feng, Yuanzhe Gao, Feng, Chao +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Graph Neural Networks #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data #Security in Wireless Sensor Networks
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.03119
openalex publication_date 2025/01/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Federated Learning (FL) is widely recognized as a privacy-preserving Machine Learning paradigm due to its model-sharing mechanism that avoids direct data exchange. Nevertheless, model training leaves exploitable traces that can be used to infer sensitive information. In Decentralized FL (DFL), the topology, defining how participants are connected, plays a crucial role in shaping the model's privacy, robustness, and convergence. However, the topology introduces an unexplored vulnerability: attackers can exploit it to infer participant relationships and launch targeted attacks. This work uncovers the hidden risks of DFL topologies by proposing a novel Topology Inference Attack that infers the topology solely from model behavior. A taxonomy of topology inference attacks is introduced, categorizing them by the attacker's capabilities and knowledge. Practical attack strategies are designed for various scenarios, and experiments are conducted to identify key factors influencing attack success. The results demonstrate that analyzing only the model of each node can accurately infer the DFL topology, highlighting a critical privacy risk in DFL systems. These findings offer insights for improving privacy preservation in DFL environments.