Quantifying Privacy Leakage in Split Inference via Fisher-Approximated Shannon Information Analysis

Abstract

Split inference (SI) partitions deep neural networks into distributed sub-models, enabling collaborative learning without directly sharing raw data. However, SI remains vulnerable to Data Reconstruction Attacks (DRAs), where adversaries exploit exposed smashed data to recover private inputs. Despite substantial progress in attack-defense methodologies, the fundamental quantification of privacy risks is still underdeveloped. This paper establishes an information-theoretic framework for privacy leakage in SI, defining leakage as the adversary's certainty and deriving both average-case and worst-case error lower bounds. We further introduce Fisher-approximated Shannon information (FSInfo), a new privacy metric based on Fisher Information (FI) that enables operational and tractable computation of privacy leakage. Building on this metric, we develop FSInfoGuard, a defense mechanism that achieves a strong privacy-utility tradeoff. Our empirical study shows that FSInfo is an effective privacy metric across datasets, models, and defense strengths, providing accurate privacy estimates that support the design of defense methods outperforming existing approaches in both privacy protection and utility preservation. The code is available at https://github.com/SASA-cloud/FSInfo.