Renaud Sirdey

Antoine Choffrut, Rachid Guerraoui, Rafael Pinot et al.

Due to the widespread availability of data, machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly being implemented in distributed topologies, wherein various nodes collaborate to train ML models via the coordination of a central server. However, distributed learning approaches face significant vulnerabilities, primarily stemming from two potential threats. Firstly, the presence of Byzantine nodes poses a risk of corrupting the learning process by transmitting inaccurate information to the server. Secondly, a curious server may compromise the privacy of individual nodes, sometimes reconstructing the entirety of the nodes' data. Homomorphic encryption (HE) has emerged as a leading security measure to preserve privacy in distributed learning under non-Byzantine scenarios. However, the extensive computational demands of HE, particularly for high-dimensional ML models, have deterred attempts to design purely homomorphic operators for non-linear robust aggregators. This paper introduces SABLE, the first homomorphic and Byzantine robust distributed learning algorithm. SABLE leverages HTS, a novel and efficient homomorphic operator implementing the prominent coordinate-wise trimmed mean robust aggregator. Designing HTS enables us to implement HMED, a novel homomorphic median aggregator. Extensive experiments on standard ML tasks demonstrate that SABLE achieves practical execution times while maintaining an ML accuracy comparable to its non-private counterpart.

Arnaud Grivet Sébert, Martin Zuber, Oana Stan et al.

While machine learning has become pervasive in as diversified fields as industry, healthcare, social networks, privacy concerns regarding the training data have gained a critical importance. In settings where several parties wish to collaboratively train a common model without jeopardizing their sensitive data, the need for a private training protocol is particularly stringent and implies to protect the data against both the model's end-users and the actors of the training phase. Differential privacy (DP) and cryptographic primitives are complementary popular countermeasures against privacy attacks. Among these cryptographic primitives, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) offers ciphertext malleability at the cost of time-consuming operations in the homomorphic domain. In this paper, we design SHIELD, a probabilistic approximation algorithm for the argmax operator which is both fast when homomorphically executed and whose inaccuracy is used as a feature to ensure DP guarantees. Even if SHIELD could have other applications, we here focus on one setting and seamlessly integrate it in the SPEED collaborative training framework from "SPEED: Secure, PrivatE, and Efficient Deep learning" (Grivet Sébert et al., 2021) to improve its computational efficiency. After thoroughly describing the FHE implementation of our algorithm and its DP analysis, we present experimental results. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work in which relaxing the accuracy of an homomorphic calculation is constructively usable as a degree of freedom to achieve better FHE performances.

Adda Akram Bendoukha, Aymen Boudguiga, Nesrine Kaaniche et al.

Federated Learning (FL) aims to train a collaborative model while preserving data privacy. However, the distributed nature of this approach still raises privacy and security issues, such as the exposure of sensitive data due to inference attacks and the influence of Byzantine behaviors on the trained model. In particular, achieving both secure aggregation and Byzantine resilience remains challenging, as existing solutions often address these aspects independently. In this work, we propose to address these challenges through a novel approach that combines homomorphic encryption for privacy-preserving aggregation with property-inference-inspired meta-classifiers for Byzantine filtering. First, following the property-inference attacks blueprint, we train a set of filtering meta-classifiers on labeled shadow updates, reproducing a diverse ensemble of Byzantine misbehaviors in FL, including backdoor, gradient-inversion, label-flipping and shuffling attacks. The outputs of these meta-classifiers are then used to cancel the Byzantine encrypted updates by reweighting. Second, we propose an automated method for selecting the optimal kernel and the dimensionality hyperparameters with respect to homomorphic inference, aggregation constraints and efficiency over the CKKS cryptosystem. Finally, we demonstrate through extensive experiments the effectiveness of our approach against Byzantine participants on the FEMNIST, CIFAR10, GTSRB, and acsincome benchmarks. More precisely, our SVM filtering achieves accuracies between $90$% and $94$% for identifying Byzantine updates at the cost of marginal losses in model utility and encrypted inference runtimes ranging from $6$ to $24$ seconds and from $9$ to $26$ seconds for an overall aggregation.

Arnaud Grivet Sébert, Renaud Sirdey, Oana Stan et al.

This paper tackles the problem of ensuring training data privacy in a federated learning context. Relying on Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Differential Privacy (DP), we propose a framework addressing threats on the privacy of the training data. Notably, the proposed framework ensures the privacy of the training data from all actors of the learning process, namely the data owners and the aggregating server. More precisely, while HE blinds a semi-honest server during the learning protocol, DP protects the data from semi-honest clients participating in the training process as well as end-users with black-box or white-box access to the trained model. In order to achieve this, we provide new theoretical and practical results to allow these techniques to be rigorously combined. In particular, by means of a novel stochastic quantisation operator, we prove DP guarantees in a context where the noise is quantised and bounded due to the use of HE. The paper is concluded by experiments which show the practicality of the entire framework in terms of both model quality (impacted by DP) and computational overhead (impacted by HE).

Arnaud Grivet Sébert, Rafael Pinot, Martin Zuber et al.

We introduce a deep learning framework able to deal with strong privacy constraints. Based on collaborative learning, differential privacy and homomorphic encryption, the proposed approach advances state-of-the-art of private deep learning against a wider range of threats, in particular the honest-but-curious server assumption. We address threats from both the aggregation server, the global model and potentially colluding data holders. Building upon distributed differential privacy and a homomorphic argmax operator, our method is specifically designed to maintain low communication loads and efficiency. The proposed method is supported by carefully crafted theoretical results. We provide differential privacy guarantees from the point of view of any entity having access to the final model, including colluding data holders, as a function of the ratio of data holders who kept their noise secret. This makes our method practical to real-life scenarios where data holders do not trust any third party to process their datasets nor the other data holders. Crucially the computational burden of the approach is maintained reasonable, and, to the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first one to be efficient enough to investigate deep learning applications while addressing such a large scope of threats. To assess the practical usability of our framework, experiments have been carried out on image datasets in a classification context. We present numerical results that show that the learning procedure is both accurate and private.