Efficient Privacy-Preserving Matrix Factorization via Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Recommendation systems become popular in our daily life. It is well known that the more the release of users’ personal data, the better the quality of recommendation. However, such services raise serious privacy concerns for users. In this paper, focusing on matrix factorization-based recommendation systems, we propose the first privacy-preserving matrix factorization using fully homomorphic encryption. On inputs of encrypted users\u27 ratings, our protocol performs matrix factorization over the encrypted data and returns encrypted outputs so that the recommendation system knows nothing on rating values and resulting user/item profiles. It provides a way to obfuscate the number and list of items a user rated without harming the accuracy of recommendation, and additionally protects recommender\u27s tuning parameters for business benefit and allows the recommender to optimize the parameters for quality of service. To overcome performance degradation caused by the use of fully homomorphic encryption, we introduce a novel data structure to perform computations over encrypted vectors, which are essential operations for matrix factorization, through secure 2-party computation in part. With the data structure, the proposed protocol requires dozens of times less computation cost over those of previous works. Our experiments on a personal computer with 3.4 GHz 6-cores 64 GB RAM show that the proposed protocol runs in 1.5 minutes per iteration. It is more efficient than Nikolaenko et al.\u27s work proposed in CCS 2013, in which it took about 170 minutes on two servers with 1.9 GHz 16-cores 128 GB RAM

Confidential Boosting with Random Linear Classifiers for Outsourced User-generated Data

User-generated data is crucial to predictive modeling in many applications. With a web/mobile/wearable interface, a data owner can continuously record data generated by distributed users and build various predictive models from the data to improve their operations, services, and revenue. Due to the large size and evolving nature of users data, data owners may rely on public cloud service providers (Cloud) for storage and computation scalability. Exposing sensitive user-generated data and advanced analytic models to Cloud raises privacy concerns. We present a confidential learning framework, SecureBoost, for data owners that want to learn predictive models from aggregated user-generated data but offload the storage and computational burden to Cloud without having to worry about protecting the sensitive data. SecureBoost allows users to submit encrypted or randomly masked data to designated Cloud directly. Our framework utilizes random linear classifiers (RLCs) as the base classifiers in the boosting framework to dramatically simplify the design of the proposed confidential boosting protocols, yet still preserve the model quality. A Cryptographic Service Provider (CSP) is used to assist the Cloud's processing, reducing the complexity of the protocol constructions. We present two constructions of SecureBoost: HE+GC and SecSh+GC, using combinations of homomorphic encryption, garbled circuits, and random masking to achieve both security and efficiency. For a boosted model, Cloud learns only the RLCs and the CSP learns only the weights of the RLCs. Finally, the data owner collects the two parts to get the complete model. We conduct extensive experiments to understand the quality of the RLC-based boosting and the cost distribution of the constructions. Our results show that SecureBoost can efficiently learn high-quality boosting models from protected user-generated data

Privacy-preserving recommendation system using federated learning

Federated Learning is a form of distributed learning which leverages edge devices for training. It aims to preserve privacy by communicating users’ learning parameters and gradient updates to the global server during the training while keeping the actual data on the users’ devices. The training on global server is performed on these parameters instead of user data directly while fine tuning of the model can be done on client’s devices locally. However, federated learning is not without its shortcomings and in this thesis, we present an overview of the learning paradigm and propose a new federated recommender system framework that utilizes homomorphic encryption. This results in a slight decrease in accuracy metrics but leads to greatly increased user-privacy. We also show that performing computations on encrypted gradients barely affects the recommendation performance while ensuring a more secure means of communicating user gradients to and from the global server