UTrace: Poisoning Forensics for Private Collaborative Learning

Abstract: Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) enables multiple data owners to contribute their data privately to a set of servers that run a secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocol to train a joint ML model. In these protocols, the input data remains private throughout the training process, and only the resulting model is made available. While this approach benefits privacy, it also exacerbates the risks of data poisoning, where compromised data owners induce undesirable model behavior by contributing malicious datasets. Existing MPC mechanisms can mitigate certain poisoning attacks, but these measures are not exhaustive. To complement existing poisoning defenses, we introduce UTrace: a framework for User-level Traceback of poisoning attacks in PPML. Utrace computes user responsibility scores using gradient similarity metrics aggregated across the most relevant samples in an owner's dataset. UTrace is effective at low poisoning rates and is resilient to poisoning attacks distributed across multiple data owners, unlike existing unlearning-based methods. We introduce methods for checkpointing gradients with low storage overhead, enabling traceback in the absence of data owners at deployment time. We also design several optimizations that reduce traceback time and communication in MPC. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of UTrace across four datasets from three data modalities (vision, text, and malware) and show its effectiveness against 10 poisoning attacks.