Hybrid Cloud-Based Privacy Preserving Clustering as Service for Enterprise Big Data

Clustering as service is being offered by many cloud service providers. It helps enterprises to learn hidden patterns and learn knowledge from large, big data generated by enterprises. Though it brings lot of value to enterprises, it also exposes the data to various security and privacy threats. Privacy preserving clustering is being proposed a solution to address this problem. But the privacy preserving clustering as outsourced service model involves too much overhead on querying user, lacks adaptivity to incremental data and involves frequent interaction between service provider and the querying user. There is also a lack of personalization to clustering by the querying user. This work “Locality Sensitive Hashing for Transformed Dataset (LSHTD)” proposes a hybrid cloud-based clustering as service model for streaming data that address the problems in the existing model such as privacy preserving k-means clustering outsourcing under multiple keys (PPCOM) and secure nearest neighbor clustering (SNNC) models, The solution combines hybrid cloud, LSHTD clustering algorithm as outsourced service model. Through experiments, the proposed solution is able is found to reduce the computation cost by 23% and communication cost by 6% and able to provide better clustering accuracy with ARI greater than 4.59% compared to existing works

A Cryptographic Ensemble for Secure Third Party Data Analysis: Collaborative Data Clustering Without Data Owner Participation

This paper introduces the twin concepts Cryptographic Ensembles and Global Encrypted Distance Matrices (GEDMs), designed to provide a solution to outsourced secure collaborative data clustering. The cryptographic ensemble comprises: Homomorphic Encryption (HE) to preserve raw data privacy, while supporting data analytics; and Multi-User Order Preserving Encryption (MUOPE) to preserve the privacy of the GEDM. Clustering can therefore be conducted over encrypted datasets without requiring decryption or the involvement of data owners once encryption has taken place, all with no loss of accuracy. The GEDM concept is applicable to large scale collaborative data mining applications that feature horizontal data partitioning. In the paper DBSCAN clustering is adopted for illustrative and evaluation purposes. The results demonstrate that the proposed solution is both efficient and accurate while maintaining data privacy

Zero-knowledge Proof Meets Machine Learning in Verifiability: A Survey

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, the usage of machine learning models is gradually becoming part of our daily lives. High-quality models rely not only on efficient optimization algorithms but also on the training and learning processes built upon vast amounts of data and computational power. However, in practice, due to various challenges such as limited computational resources and data privacy concerns, users in need of models often cannot train machine learning models locally. This has led them to explore alternative approaches such as outsourced learning and federated learning. While these methods address the feasibility of model training effectively, they introduce concerns about the trustworthiness of the training process since computations are not performed locally. Similarly, there are trustworthiness issues associated with outsourced model inference. These two problems can be summarized as the trustworthiness problem of model computations: How can one verify that the results computed by other participants are derived according to the specified algorithm, model, and input data? To address this challenge, verifiable machine learning (VML) has emerged. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of zero-knowledge proof-based verifiable machine learning (ZKP-VML) technology. We first analyze the potential verifiability issues that may exist in different machine learning scenarios. Subsequently, we provide a formal definition of ZKP-VML. We then conduct a detailed analysis and classification of existing works based on their technical approaches. Finally, we discuss the key challenges and future directions in the field of ZKP-based VML

Security in Data Mining- A Comprehensive Survey

Data mining techniques, while allowing the individuals to extract hidden knowledge on one hand, introduce a number of privacy threats on the other hand. In this paper, we study some of these issues along with a detailed discussion on the applications of various data mining techniques for providing security. An efficient classification technique when used properly, would allow an user to differentiate between a phishing website and a normal website, to classify the users as normal users and criminals based on their activities on Social networks (Crime Profiling) and to prevent users from executing malicious codes by labelling them as malicious. The most important applications of Data mining is the detection of intrusions, where different Data mining techniques can be applied to effectively detect an intrusion and report in real time so that necessary actions are taken to thwart the attempts of the intruder. Privacy Preservation, Outlier Detection, Anomaly Detection and PhishingWebsite Classification are discussed in this paper

Find Thy Neighbourhood: Privacy-Preserving Local Clustering

Identifying a cluster around a seed node in a graph, termed local clustering, finds use in several applications, including fraud detection, targeted advertising, community detection, etc. However, performing local clustering is challenging when the graph is distributed among multiple data owners, which is further aggravated by the privacy concerns that arise in disclosing their view of the graph. This necessitates designing solutions for privacy-preserving local clustering and is addressed for the first time in the literature. We propose using the technique of secure multiparty computation (MPC) to achieve the same. Our local clustering algorithm is based on the heat kernel PageRank (HKPR) metric, which produces the best-known cluster quality. En route to our final solution, we have two important steps: (i) designing data-oblivious equivalent of the state-of-the-art algorithms for computing local clustering and HKPR values, and (ii) compiling the data-oblivious algorithms into its secure realisation via an MPC framework that supports operations over fixed-point arithmetic representation such as multiplication and division. Keeping efficiency in mind for large graphs, we choose the best-known honest-majority 3-party framework of SWIFT (Koti et al., USENIX\u2721) and enhance it with some of the necessary yet missing primitives, before using it for our purpose. We benchmark the performance of our secure protocols, and the reported run time showcases the practicality of the same. Further, we perform extensive experiments to evaluate the accuracy loss of our protocols. Compared to their cleartext counterparts, we observe that the results are comparable and thus showcase the practicality of the designed protocols

Uncovering the Potential of Federated Learning: Addressing Algorithmic and Data-driven Challenges under Privacy Restrictions

Federated learning is a groundbreaking distributed machine learning paradigm that allows for the collaborative training of models across various entities without directly sharing sensitive data, ensuring privacy and robustness. This Ph.D. dissertation delves into the intricacies of federated learning, investigating the algorithmic and data-driven challenges of deep learning models in the presence of additive noise in this framework. The main objective is to provide strategies to measure the generalization, stability, and privacy-preserving capabilities of these models and further improve them. To this end, five noise infusion mechanisms at varying noise levels within centralized and federated learning settings are explored. As model complexity is a key component of the generalization and stability of deep learning models during training and evaluation, a comparative analysis of three Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures is provided. A key contribution of this study is introducing specific metrics for training with noise. Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) is introduced as a quantitative measure of the trade-off between privacy and training accuracy of noise-infused models, aiming to find the noise level that yields optimal privacy and accuracy. Moreover, the Price of Stability and Price of Anarchy are defined in the context of privacy-preserving deep learning, contributing to the systematic investigation of the noise infusion mechanisms to enhance privacy without compromising performance. This research sheds light on the delicate balance between these critical factors, fostering a deeper understanding of the implications of noise-based regularization in machine learning. The present study also explores a real-world application of federated learning in weather prediction applications that suffer from the issue of imbalanced datasets. Utilizing data from multiple sources combined with advanced data augmentation techniques improves the accuracy and generalization of weather prediction models, even when dealing with imbalanced datasets. Overall, federated learning is pivotal in harnessing decentralized datasets for real-world applications while safeguarding privacy. By leveraging noise as a tool for regularization and privacy enhancement, this research study aims to contribute to the development of robust, privacy-aware algorithms, ensuring that AI-driven solutions prioritize both utility and privacy