Slalom: Fast, Verifiable and Private Execution of Neural Networks in Trusted Hardware
This addresses the need for fast, secure outsourced ML computations in sensitive domains, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the performance overhead of executing deep neural networks in trusted hardware by partitioning computations between trusted and untrusted devices, achieving 6x to 20x throughput increases for verifiable inference and 4x to 11x for private inference on canonical DNNs.
As Machine Learning (ML) gets applied to security-critical or sensitive domains, there is a growing need for integrity and privacy for outsourced ML computations. A pragmatic solution comes from Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), which use hardware and software protections to isolate sensitive computations from the untrusted software stack. However, these isolation guarantees come at a price in performance, compared to untrusted alternatives. This paper initiates the study of high performance execution of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in TEEs by efficiently partitioning DNN computations between trusted and untrusted devices. Building upon an efficient outsourcing scheme for matrix multiplication, we propose Slalom, a framework that securely delegates execution of all linear layers in a DNN from a TEE (e.g., Intel SGX or Sanctum) to a faster, yet untrusted, co-located processor. We evaluate Slalom by running DNNs in an Intel SGX enclave, which selectively delegates work to an untrusted GPU. For canonical DNNs (VGG16, MobileNet and ResNet variants) we obtain 6x to 20x increases in throughput for verifiable inference, and 4x to 11x for verifiable and private inference.