Membership inference attack aims to identify whether a data sample was used to train a machine learning model or not. It can raise severe privacy risks as the membership can reveal an individuals sensitive information. For example, identifying an individuals participation in a hospitals health analytics training set reveals that this individual was once a patient in that hospital. Membership inference attacks have been shown to be effective on various machine learning models, such as classification models, generative models, and sequence-to-sequence models. Meanwhile, many methods are proposed to defend such a privacy attack. Although membership inference attack is an emerging and rapidly growing research area, there is no comprehensive survey on this topic yet. In this paper, we bridge this important gap in membership inference attack literature. We present the first comprehensive survey of membership inference attacks. We summarize and categorize existing membership inference attacks and defenses and explicitly present how to implement attacks in various settings. Besides, we discuss why membership inference attacks work and summarize the benchmark datasets to facilitate comparison and ensure fairness of future work. Finally, we propose several possible directions for future research and possible applications relying on reviewed works.
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