Membership inference attacks (MIA) can reveal whether a particular data point
was part of the training dataset, potentially exposing sensitive information
about individuals. This article provides theoretical guarantees by exploring
the fundamental statistical limitations associated with MIAs on machine
learning models at large. More precisely, we first derive the statistical
quantity that governs the effectiveness and success of such attacks. We then
theoretically prove that in a non-linear regression setting with overfitting
learning procedures, attacks may have a high probability of success. Finally,
we investigate several situations for which we provide bounds on this quantity
of interest. Interestingly, our findings indicate that discretizing the data
might enhance the learning procedure's security. Specifically, it is
demonstrated to be limited by a constant, which quantifies the diversity of the
underlying data distribution. We illustrate those results through simple
simulations.