Breaking the Black-Box: Confidence-Guided Model Inversion Attack for Distribution Shift

Model inversion attacks (MIAs) seek to infer the private training data of a target classifier by generating synthetic images that reflect the characteristics of the target class through querying the model. However, prior studies have relied on full access to the target model, which is not practical in real-world scenarios. Additionally, existing black-box MIAs assume that the image prior and target model follow the same distribution. However, when confronted with diverse data distribution settings, these methods may result in suboptimal performance in conducting attacks. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Confidence-Guided Model Inversion attack method called CG-MI, which utilizes the latent space of a pre-trained publicly available generative adversarial network (GAN) as prior information and gradient-free optimizer, enabling high-resolution MIAs across different data distributions in a black-box setting. Our experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the SOTA black-box MIA by more than 49% for Celeba and 58% for Facescrub in different distribution settings. Furthermore, our method exhibits the ability to generate high-quality images comparable to those produced by white-box attacks. Our method provides a practical and effective solution for black-box model inversion attacks.