Class Attribute Inference Attacks: Inferring Sensitive Class Information by Diffusion-Based Attribute Manipulations

Neural network-based image classifiers are powerful tools for computer vision tasks, but they inadvertently reveal sensitive attribute information about their classes, raising concerns about their privacy. To investigate this privacy leakage, we introduce the first Class Attribute Inference Attack (CAIA), which leverages recent advances in text-to-image synthesis to infer sensitive attributes of individual classes in a black-box setting, while remaining competitive with related white-box attacks. Our extensive experiments in the face recognition domain show that CAIA accurately infers undisclosed sensitive attributes, such as an individual's hair color, gender, and racial appearance, which are not part of the training labels.