In this paper we propose a new membership attack method called co-membership
attacks against deep generative models including Variational Autoencoders
(VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Specifically, membership
attack aims to check whether a given instance x was used in the training data
or not. A co-membership attack checks whether the given bundle of n instances
were in the training, with the prior knowledge that the bundle was either
entirely used in the training or none at all. Successful membership attacks can
compromise the privacy of training data when the generative model is published.
Our main idea is to cast membership inference of target data x as the
optimization of another neural network (called the attacker network) to search
for the latent encoding to reproduce x. The final reconstruction error is used
directly to conclude whether x was in the training data or not. We conduct
extensive experiments on a variety of datasets and generative models showing
that: our attacker network outperforms prior membership attacks; co-membership
attacks can be substantially more powerful than single attacks; and VAEs are
more susceptible to membership attacks compared to GANs.