Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are increasingly adopted by the industry to synthesize realistic images using competing generator and discriminator neural networks. Due to data not being centrally available, Multi-Discriminator (MD)-GANs training frameworks employ multiple discriminators that have direct access to the real data. Distributedly training a joint GAN model entails the risk of free-riders, i.e., participants that aim to benefit from the common model while only pretending to participate in the training process. In this paper, we first define a free-rider as a participant without training data and then identify three possible actions: not training, training on synthetic data, or using pre-trained models for similar but not identical tasks that are publicly available. We conduct experiments to explore the impact of these three types of free-riders on the ability of MD-GANs to produce images that are indistinguishable from real data. We consequently design a defense against free-riders, termed DFG, which compares the performance of client discriminators to reference discriminators at the server. The defense allows the server to evict clients whose behavior does not match that of a benign client. The result shows that even when 67% of the clients are free-riders, the proposed DFG can improve synthetic image quality by up to 70.96%, compared to the case of no defense.

Attacks on Federated Learning (FL) can severely reduce the quality of the generated models and limit the usefulness of this emerging learning paradigm that enables on-premise decentralized learning. However, existing untargeted attacks are not practical for many scenarios as they assume that i) the attacker knows every update of benign clients, or ii) the attacker has a large dataset to locally train updates imitating benign parties. In this paper, we propose a data-free untargeted attack (DFA) that synthesizes malicious data to craft adversarial models without eavesdropping on the transmission of benign clients at all or requiring a large quantity of task-specific training data. We design two variants of DFA, namely DFA-R and DFA-G, which differ in how they trade off stealthiness and effectiveness. Specifically, DFA-R iteratively optimizes a malicious data layer to minimize the prediction confidence of all outputs of the global model, whereas DFA-G interactively trains a malicious data generator network by steering the output of the global model toward a particular class. Experimental results on Fashion-MNIST, Cifar-10, and SVHN show that DFA, despite requiring fewer assumptions than existing attacks, achieves similar or even higher attack success rate than state-of-the-art untargeted attacks against various state-of-the-art defense mechanisms. Concretely, they can evade all considered defense mechanisms in at least 50% of the cases for CIFAR-10 and often reduce the accuracy by more than a factor of 2. Consequently, we design REFD, a defense specifically crafted to protect against data-free attacks. REFD leverages a reference dataset to detect updates that are biased or have a low confidence. It greatly improves upon existing defenses by filtering out the malicious updates and achieves high global model accuracy.