Understanding and Controlling User Linkability in Decentralized Learning

Machine Learning techniques are widely used by online services (e.g. Google, Apple) in order to analyze and make predictions on user data. As many of the provided services are user-centric (e.g. personal photo collections, speech recognition, personal assistance), user data generated on personal devices is key to provide the service. In order to protect the data and the privacy of the user, federated learning techniques have been proposed where the data never leaves the user's device and "only" model updates are communicated back to the server. In our work, we propose a new threat model that is not concerned with learning about the content - but rather is concerned with the linkability of users during such decentralized learning scenarios. We show that model updates are characteristic for users and therefore lend themselves to linkability attacks. We show identification and matching of users across devices in closed and open world scenarios. In our experiments, we find our attacks to be highly effective, achieving 20x-175x chance-level performance. In order to mitigate the risks of linkability attacks, we study various strategies. As adding random noise does not offer convincing operation points, we propose strategies based on using calibrated domain-specific data; we find these strategies offers substantial protection against linkability threats with little effect to utility.