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Crypto-Nets: Neural Networks Over Encrypted Data (arxiv.org)
1 point by nl on Jan 28, 2015 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A user locks up their data with encryption that lets a cloud service do math on it, so a neural network can predict without seeing the records. Its math was adjusted to work on locked values, keeping data and answer private without losing accuracy.

Abstract · Crypto-Nets: Neural Networks over Encrypted Data

The problem we address is the following: how can a user employ a predictive model that is held by a third party, without compromising private information. For example, a hospital may wish to use a cloud service to predict the readmission risk of a patient. However, due to regulations, the patient's medical files cannot be revealed. The goal is to make an inference using the model, without jeopardizing the accuracy of the prediction or the privacy of the data. To achieve high accuracy, we use neural networks, which have been shown to outperform other learning models for many tasks. To achieve the privacy requirements, we use homomorphic encryption in the following protocol: the data owner encrypts the data and sends the ciphertexts to the third party to obtain a prediction from a trained model. The model operates on these ciphertexts and sends back the encrypted prediction. In this protocol, not only the data remains private, even the values predicted are available only to the data owner. Using homomorphic encryption and modifications to the activation functions and training algorithms of neural networks, we show that it is protocol is possible and may be feasible. This method paves the way to build a secure cloud-based neural network prediction services without invading users' privacy.

Pengtao Xie, Misha Bilenko, Tom Finley, Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Kristin Lauter, Michael Naehrig
arXiv:1412.6181 · cs.LG, cs.CR, cs.NE · submitted Dec 18, 2014 · updated Dec 24, 2014
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