Title: Be Careful When Fine-tuning On Open-Source LLMs: Your Fine-tuning Data Could Be Secretly Stolen!
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: finetuning data stealing, open-source LLMs, backdoor training

Abstract: Fine-tuning on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) with proprietary data is now a standard practice for downstream developers to obtain task-specific models. Surprisingly, we reveal a new and concerning risk along with the practice: the provider of the open-source LLMs can later extract the private downstream fine-tuning data through simple backdoor training, only requiring black-box access to the fine-tuned downstream model. Our comprehensive experiments, across 4 popularly used open-source models with 3B to 32B parameters and 2 downstream datasets, suggest that the extraction performance can be strikingly high: in practical settings, as much as 76.3\% downstream fine-tuning data (queries) out of a total 5,000 samples can be perfectly extracted, and the success rate can increase to 94.9\% in more ideal settings. We further investigate several defense strategies, but none achieve satisfactory effectiveness in mitigating the risk. Overall, we highlight the emergency of this newly identified data breaching risk in fine-tuning, and we hope more follow-up research can push the progress of addressing this concerning risk.

TL;DR: We identify a new risk: the provider of the open-source LLMs could steal the private downstream finetuning data through backdoor training, only requiring black-box access to the fine-tuned downstream model.