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Hard to Forget: Poisoning Attacks on Certified Machine Unlearning

This repository implements a poisoning attack against machine unlearning as proposed in the following paper:

Marchant, N. G., Rubinstein, B. I. P., & Alfeld, S. (2022). Hard to Forget: Poisoning Attacks on Certified Machine Unlearning. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (to appear). [arXiv:2109.08266]

The attack aims to increase the computational cost of processing unlearning requests for a model trained on user data. This is done by poisoning user data under the attacker's control and then requesting that the poisoned data be unlearned.

Requirements

• Python >=3.9
• NumPy >=1.20
• JAX >=0.2.14
• TensorFlow Probability >=0.13
• CUDA >=11.1
• cuDNN >=8.0.5

We used the prebuilt wheels for CUDA 11.1 and cuDNN 8.0.5 as specified in the Pipfile. Note that CUDA and cuDNN must be installed manually: they are not bundled with JAX.

Code structure

We attack an unlearning approach for regularized linear models due to Guo et al. (2020) called certified removal. Models that support this form of unlearning are implemented in the following files:

• binary_logreg.py: binary logistic regression
• multi_logreg.py: one-vs-rest (OvR) multi-class logistic regression
• preprocess_logreg.py: OvR multi-class logistic regression with support for a fixed (differentiable) pre-processing layer

Simulations of our attack are implemented primarily in run_experiment.py. This script can be called from the command line as follows:

$ python -m run_experiment \
    --expt-name mnist_binary \
    --file-prefix mnist_binary_experiment \
    --sigma 1.0 \
    --lamb 1e-3 \
    --num-poison "[500]" \
    --num-removals 1000 \
    --no-retrain \
    --pert-ball-radius 39.25 \
    --pgd-init-step 78.5 \
    --pgd-max-iter 10 \
    --adv-obj influence_norm \
    --p-norm 1

Please see run_experiment.py for documentation and the full list of possible arguments.