Federated learning is considered as an effective privacy-preserving learning
mechanism that separates the client's data and model training process. However,
federated learning is still under the risk of privacy leakage because of the
existence of attackers who deliberately conduct gradient leakage attacks to
reconstruct the client data. Recently, popular strategies such as gradient
perturbation methods and input encryption methods have been proposed to defend
against gradient leakage attacks. Nevertheless, these defenses can either
greatly sacrifice the model performance, or be evaded by more advanced attacks.
In this paper, we propose a new defense method to protect the privacy of
clients' data by learning to obscure data. Our defense method can generate
synthetic samples that are totally distinct from the original samples, but they
can also maximally preserve their predictive features and guarantee the model
performance. Furthermore, our defense strategy makes the gradient leakage
attack and its variants extremely difficult to reconstruct the client data.
Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed defense method obtains
better privacy protection while preserving high accuracy compared with
state-of-the-art methods.