Privacy-Preserving Distributed Machine Learning Based on Secret Sharing

Authors: Ye Dong, Xiaojun Chen, Liyan Shen, and Dakui Wang

Abstract: Machine Learning has been widely applied in practice, such as disease diagnosis, target detection. Commonly, a good model relies on massive training data collected from different sources. However, the collected data might expose sensitive information. To solve the problem, researchers have proposed many excellent methods that combine machine learning with privacy protection technologies, such as secure multiparty computation (MPC), homomorphic encryption (HE), and differential privacy. In the meanwhile, some other researchers proposed distributed machine learning which allows the clients to store their data locally but train a model collaboratively. The first kind of methods focuses on security, but the performance and accuracy remain to be improved, while the second provides higher accuracy and better performance but weaker security, for instance, the adversary can launch membership attacks from the gradients’ updates in plaintext.

In this paper, we join secret sharing to distributed machine learning to achieve reliable performance, accuracy, and high-level security. Next, we design, implement, and evaluate a practical system to jointly learn an accurate model under semi-honest and servers-only malicious adversary security, respectively. And the experiments show our protocols achieve the best overall performance as well.