Machine learning (ML) has progressed rapidly during the past decade and the
major factor that drives such development is the unprecedented large-scale
data. As data generation is a continuous process, this leads to ML model owners
updating their models frequently with newly-collected data in an online
learning scenario. In consequence, if an ML model is queried with the same set
of data samples at two different points in time, it will provide different
results.
In this paper, we investigate whether the change in the output of a black-box
ML model before and after being updated can leak information of the dataset
used to perform the update, namely the updating set. This constitutes a new
attack surface against black-box ML models and such information leakage may
compromise the intellectual property and data privacy of the ML model owner. We
propose four attacks following an encoder-decoder formulation, which allows
inferring diverse information of the updating set. Our new attacks are
facilitated by state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. In particular, we
propose a hybrid generative model (CBM-GAN) that is based on generative
adversarial networks (GANs) but includes a reconstructive loss that allows
reconstructing accurate samples. Our experiments show that the proposed attacks
achieve strong performance.