Federated Learning has emerged as a privacy-oriented alternative to
centralized Machine Learning, enabling collaborative model training without
direct data sharing. While extensively studied for neural networks, the
security and privacy implications of tree-based models remain underexplored.
This work introduces TimberStrike, an optimization-based dataset reconstruction
attack targeting horizontally federated tree-based models. Our attack, carried
out by a single client, exploits the discrete nature of decision trees by using
split values and decision paths to infer sensitive training data from other
clients. We evaluate TimberStrike on State-of-the-Art federated gradient
boosting implementations across multiple frameworks, including Flower, NVFlare,
and FedTree, demonstrating their vulnerability to privacy breaches. On a
publicly available stroke prediction dataset, TimberStrike consistently
reconstructs between 73.05% and 95.63% of the target dataset across all
implementations. We further analyze Differential Privacy, showing that while it
partially mitigates the attack, it also significantly degrades model
performance. Our findings highlight the need for privacy-preserving mechanisms
specifically designed for tree-based Federated Learning systems, and we provide
preliminary insights into their design.