Fine-grained Manipulation Attacks to Local Differential Privacy Protocols for Data Streams

Local Differential Privacy (LDP) enables massive data collection and analysis while protecting end users’ privacy against untrusted aggregators. It has been applied to various data types (e.g., categorical, numerical, and graph data) and application settings (e.g., static and streaming). Recent findings indicate that LDP protocols can be easily disrupted by poisoning or manipulation attacks, where an attacker can leverage injected/corrupted fake users to send crafted data to the aggregator in order to manipulate the final estimate of the aggregator. However, current attacks primarily target static protocols, neglecting the security of LDP protocols in the streaming settings. Our research fills the gap by developing novel fine-grained manipulation attacks to LDP protocols for data streams. By reviewing the attack surfaces in existing algorithms, we introduce a unified attack framework with composable modules, which can manipulate the LDP estimated stream toward a target stream. Our attack framework can adapt to state-of-the-art streaming LDP algorithms with different analytic tasks (e.g., frequency and mean) and LDP models (event-level, user-level, <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$w$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>w</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="ren-ieq1-3652139.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-event level). We verify our attacks theoretically and validate them through extensive experiments on real-world datasets. Finally, we explore a possible defense mechanism for mitigating our attacks.