Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as a new form of collaborative
machine learning, where a common model can be learned while keeping all the
training data on local devices. Although it is designed for enhancing the data
privacy, we demonstrated in this paper a new direction in inference attacks in
the context of FL, where valuable information about training data can be
obtained by adversaries with very limited power. In particular, we proposed
three new types of attacks to exploit this vulnerability. The first type of
attack, Class Sniffing, can detect whether a certain label appears in training.
The other two types of attacks can determine the quantity of each label, i.e.,
Quantity Inference attack determines the composition proportion of the training
label owned by the selected clients in a single round, while Whole
Determination attack determines that of the whole training process. We
evaluated our attacks on a variety of tasks and datasets with different
settings, and the corresponding results showed that our attacks work well
generally. Finally, we analyzed the impact of major hyper-parameters to our
attacks and discussed possible defenses.