On the Privacy of Federated Pipelines

Federated learning (FL) is becoming an increasingly popular machine learning paradigm in application scenarios where sensitive data available at various local sites cannot be shared due to privacy protection regulations. In FL, the sensitive data never leaves the local sites and only model parameters are shared with a global aggregator. Nonetheless, it has recently been shown that, under some circumstances, the private data can be reconstructed from the model parameters, which implies that data leakage can occur in FL. In this paper, we draw attention to another risk associated with FL: Even if federated algorithms are individually privacy-preserving, combining them into pipelines is not necessarily privacy-preserving. We provide a concrete example from genome-wide association studies, where the combination of federated principal component analysis and federated linear regression allows the aggregator to retrieve sensitive patient data by solving an instance of the multidimensional subset sum problem. This supports the increasing awareness in the field that, for FL to be truly privacy-preserving, measures have to be undertaken to protect against data leakage at the aggregator.