In this work, we demonstrate universal multi-party poisoning attacks that
adapt and apply to any multi-party learning process with arbitrary interaction
pattern between the parties. More generally, we introduce and study
$(k,p)$-poisoning attacks in which an adversary controls $k\in[m]$ of the
parties, and for each corrupted party $P_i$, the adversary submits some
poisoned data $\mathcal{T}'_i$ on behalf of $P_i$ that is still
``$(1-p)$-close'' to the correct data $\mathcal{T}_i$ (e.g., $1-p$ fraction of
$\mathcal{T}'_i$ is still honestly generated). We prove that for any ``bad''
property $B$ of the final trained hypothesis $h$ (e.g., $h$ failing on a
particular test example or having ``large'' risk) that has an arbitrarily small
constant probability of happening without the attack, there always is a
$(k,p)$-poisoning attack that increases the probability of $B$ from $\mu$ to by
$\mu^{1-p \cdot k/m} = \mu + \Omega(p \cdot k/m)$. Our attack only uses clean
labels, and it is online.
More generally, we prove that for any bounded function $f(x_1,\dots,x_n) \in
[0,1]$ defined over an $n$-step random process $\mathbf{X} = (x_1,\dots,x_n)$,
an adversary who can override each of the $n$ blocks with even dependent
probability $p$ can increase the expected output by at least $\Omega(p \cdot
\mathrm{Var}[f(\mathbf{x})])$.