Addressing Membership Inference Attack in Federated Learning with Model Compression

Federated Learning (FL) has been proposed as a privacy-preserving solution for machine learning. However, recent works have shown that Federated Learning can leak private client data through membership attacks. In this paper, we show that the effectiveness of these attacks on the clients negatively correlates with the size of the client datasets and model complexity. Based on this finding, we propose model-agnostic Federated Learning as a privacy-enhancing solution because it enables the use of models of varying complexity in the clients. To this end, we present $\texttt{MaPP-FL}$, a novel privacy-aware FL approach that leverages model compression on the clients while keeping a full model on the server. We compare the performance of $\texttt{MaPP-FL}$ against state-of-the-art model-agnostic FL methods on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and FEMNIST vision datasets. Our experiments show the effectiveness of $\texttt{MaPP-FL}$ in preserving the clients' and the server's privacy while achieving competitive classification accuracies.