Among all privacy attacks against Machine Learning (ML), membership inference
attacks (MIA) attracted the most attention. In these attacks, the attacker is
given an ML model and a data point, and they must infer whether the data point
was used for training. The attacker also has an auxiliary dataset to tune their
inference algorithm.
Attack papers commonly simulate setups in which the attacker's and the
target's datasets are sampled from the same distribution. This setting is
convenient to perform experiments, but it rarely holds in practice. ML
literature commonly starts with similar simplifying assumptions (i.e., "i.i.d."
datasets), and later generalizes the results to support heterogeneous data
distributions. Similarly, our work makes a first step in the generalization of
the MIA evaluation to heterogeneous data.
First, we design a metric to measure the heterogeneity between any pair of
tabular data distributions. This metric provides a continuous scale to analyze
the phenomenon. Second, we compare two methodologies to simulate a data
heterogeneity between the target and the attacker. These setups provide
opposite performances: 90% attack accuracy vs. 50% (i.e., random guessing). Our
results show that the MIA accuracy depends on the experimental setup; and even
if research on MIA considers heterogeneous data setups, we have no standardized
baseline of how to simulate it. The lack of such a baseline for MIA experiments
poses a significant challenge to risk assessments in real-world machine
learning scenarios.