  Deep Learning has recently become hugely popular in machine learning,
providing significant improvements in classification accuracy in the presence
of highly-structured and large databases.
  Researchers have also considered privacy implications of deep learning.
Models are typically trained in a centralized manner with all the data being
processed by the same training algorithm. If the data is a collection of users'
private data, including habits, personal pictures, geographical positions,
interests, and more, the centralized server will have access to sensitive
information that could potentially be mishandled. To tackle this problem,
collaborative deep learning models have recently been proposed where parties
locally train their deep learning structures and only share a subset of the
parameters in the attempt to keep their respective training sets private.
Parameters can also be obfuscated via differential privacy (DP) to make
information extraction even more challenging, as proposed by Shokri and
Shmatikov at CCS'15.
  Unfortunately, we show that any privacy-preserving collaborative deep
learning is susceptible to a powerful attack that we devise in this paper. In
particular, we show that a distributed, federated, or decentralized deep
learning approach is fundamentally broken and does not protect the training
sets of honest participants. The attack we developed exploits the real-time
nature of the learning process that allows the adversary to train a Generative
Adversarial Network (GAN) that generates prototypical samples of the targeted
training set that was meant to be private (the samples generated by the GAN are
intended to come from the same distribution as the training data).
Interestingly, we show that record-level DP applied to the shared parameters of
the model, as suggested in previous work, is ineffective (i.e., record-level DP
is not designed to address our attack).
