Speaker: Marco Di Gennaro
7 Novembre 2025 | 11.30
DEIB - NECSTLab Meeting Room (Ed. 20)
Online by Zoom
Contatti: Prof. Marco Santambrogio
Sommario
On Friday, November 7, 2025, at 11:30 am we will have a new talk for the series #NECSTFridayTalk.During this talk, we will have, as speaker, Marco Di Gennaro, PhD at Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria.
This talk presents TimberStrike, a novel dataset reconstruction attack against federated tree-based models. While Federated Learning is often regarded as privacy-preserving, our findings show that popular gradient boosting frameworks, including Flower, NVFlare, and FedTree, are vulnerable to severe information leakage. By exploiting split values and decision paths, a single malicious client can reconstruct most of the training data contributed by other participants. During the talk, I will discuss the attack’s design, its empirical impact in recovering up to 95% of private data, and why existing defenses such as Differential Privacy remain insufficient, underscoring the urgent need for privacy mechanisms specifically tailored to tree-based Federated Learning.
The NECSTLab is a DEIB laboratory, with different research lines on advanced topics in computing systems: from architectural characteristics, to hardware-software codesign methodologies, to security and dependability issues of complex system architectures.
Every week, the “NECSTFridayTalk” invites researchers, professionals or entrepreneurs to share their work experiences and projects they are implementing in the “Computing Systems”.