Federated machine learning which enables resource constrained node devices (e.g., mobile phones and IoT devices) to learn a shared model while keeping the training data local, can provide privacy, security and economic benefits by designing an effective communication protocol. However, the communication protocol amongst different nodes could be exploited by attackers to launch data poisoning attacks, which has been demonstrated as a big threat to most machine learning models. In this paper, we attempt to explore the vulnerability of federated machine learning. More specifically, we focus on attacking a federated multi-task learning framework, which is a federated learning framework via adopting a general multi-task learning framework to handle statistical challenges. We formulate the problem of computing optimal poisoning attacks on federated multi-task learning as a bilevel program that is adaptive to arbitrary choice of target nodes and source attacking nodes. Then we propose a novel systems-aware optimization method, ATTack on Federated Learning (AT2FL), which is efficiency to derive the implicit gradients for poisoned data, and further compute optimal attack strategies in the federated machine learning. Our work is an earlier study that considers issues of data poisoning attack for federated learning. To the end, experimental results on real-world datasets show that federated multi-task learning model is very sensitive to poisoning attacks, when the attackers either directly poison the target nodes or indirectly poison the related nodes by exploiting the communication protocol.
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