BackMembership inference attack

Membership inference attack

AI Risk Atlas

IBM (2025)

Sub-category

Risk Domain

2.2AI system security vulnerabilities and attacks

Vulnerabilities that can be exploited in AI systems, software development toolchains, and hardware, resulting in unauthorized access, data and privacy breaches, or system manipulation causing unsafe outputs or behavior.

"A membership inference attack repeatedly queries a model to determine whether a given input was part of the model’s training. More specifically, given a trained model and a data sample, an attacker samples the input space, observing outputs to deduce whether that sample was part of the model's training."

Entity: Who or what caused the harm

Human

Due to a decision or action made by humans

AI system

Due to a decision or action made by an AI system

Other

Due to some other reason or is ambiguous

Intent: Whether the harm was intentional or accidental

Intentional

Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal

Unintentional

Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal

Other

Without clearly specifying the intentionality

Timing: Whether the risk is pre- or post-deployment

Pre-deployment

Occurring before the AI is deployed

Post-deployment

Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed

Other

Without a clearly specified time of occurrence

Supporting Evidence (1)

"Identifying whether a data sample was used for training data can reveal what data was used to train a model. Possibly giving competitors insight into how a model was trained and the opportunity to replicate the model or tamper with it. Models that include publicly-available data are at higher risk of such attacks."