Adversarial Attacks on Locally Private Graph Neural Networks

arXiv cs.LG / 3/24/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper studies how adversarial attacks affect graph neural networks trained with Local Differential Privacy (LDP), focusing on the security–privacy tradeoff in graph learning.
  • It analyzes whether common adversarial attack strategies remain effective when LDP constraints are applied and explains how those constraints can make crafting adversarial examples harder or change attack behavior.
  • The work examines how LDP’s privacy guarantees may be leveraged or hindered by adversarial perturbations, clarifying the conditions under which robustness is improved or degraded.
  • It outlines practical challenges for building attacks under LDP and proposes future defense directions to better protect LDP-protected GNNs against adversarial threats.
  • Overall, the article emphasizes the need for GNN architectures that are simultaneously privacy-preserving and adversarially robust when handling sensitive graph-structured data.

Abstract

Graph neural network (GNN) is a powerful tool for analyzing graph-structured data. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks raises serious concerns, especially when dealing with sensitive information. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers a privacy-preserving framework for training GNNs, but its impact on adversarial robustness remains underexplored. This paper investigates adversarial attacks on LDP-protected GNNs. We explore how the privacy guarantees of LDP can be leveraged or hindered by adversarial perturbations. The effectiveness of existing attack methods on LDP-protected GNNs are analyzed and potential challenges in crafting adversarial examples under LDP constraints are discussed. Additionally, we suggest directions for defending LDP-protected GNNs against adversarial attacks. This work investigates the interplay between privacy and security in graph learning, highlighting the need for robust and privacy-preserving GNN architectures.