A surprising phenomenon in modern machine learning is the ability of a highly
overparameterized model to generalize well (small error on the test data) even
when it is trained to memorize the training data (zero error on the training
data). This has led to an arms race towards increasingly overparameterized
models (c.f., deep learning). In this paper, we study an underexplored hidden
cost of overparameterization: the fact that overparameterized models may be
more vulnerable to privacy attacks, in particular the membership inference
attack that predicts the (potentially sensitive) examples used to train a
model. We significantly extend the relatively few empirical results on this
problem by theoretically proving for an overparameterized linear regression
model in the Gaussian data setting that membership inference vulnerability
increases with the number of parameters. Moreover, a range of empirical studies
indicates that more complex, nonlinear models exhibit the same behavior.
Finally, we extend our analysis towards ridge-regularized linear regression and
show in the Gaussian data setting that increased regularization also increases
membership inference vulnerability in the overparameterized regime.