Local Differential Privacy Based Membership-Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning for Deep-Learning-Driven Remote Sensing

With the development of deep learning, image recognition based on deep learning is now widely used in remote sensing. As we know, the effectiveness of deep learning models significantly benefits from the size and quality of the dataset. However, remote sensing data are often distributed in different parts. They cannot be shared directly for privacy and security reasons, and this has motivated some scholars to apply federated learning (FL) to remote sensing. However, research has found that federated learning is usually vulnerable to white-box membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to infer whether a piece of data was participating in model training. In remote sensing, the MIA can lead to the disclosure of sensitive information about the model trainers, such as their location and type, as well as time information about the remote sensing equipment. To solve this issue, we consider embedding local differential privacy (LDP) into FL and propose LDP-Fed. LDP-Fed performs local differential privacy perturbation after properly pruning the uploaded parameters, preventing the central server from obtaining the original local models from the participants. To achieve a trade-off between privacy and model performance, LDP-Fed adds different noise levels to the parameters for various layers of the local models. This paper conducted comprehensive experiments to evaluate the framework's effectiveness on two remote sensing image datasets and two machine learning benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that remote sensing image classification models are susceptible to MIAs, and our framework can successfully defend against white-box MIA while achieving an excellent global model.