How can multiple distributed entities collaboratively train a shared deep net on their private data while preserving privacy? This paper introduces InstaHide, a simple encryption of training images, which can be plugged into existing distributed deep learning pipelines. The encryption is efficient and applying it during training has minor effect on test accuracy.

InstaHide encrypts each training image with a “one-time secret key” which consists of mixing a number of randomly chosen images and applying a random pixel-wise mask. Other contributions of this paper include: (a) Using a large public dataset (e.g. ImageNet) for mixing during its encryption, which improves security. (b) Experimental results to show effectiveness in preserving privacy against known attacks with only minor effects on accuracy. (c)Theoretical analysis showing that successfully attacking privacy requires attackers to solve a difficult computational problem. (d) Demonstrating that use of the pixel-wise mask is important for security, since Mixupalone is shown to be insecure to some some efficient at-tacks. (e) Release of a challenge dataset1to encourage new attacks. Read More

For privacy concerns to be addressed adequately in today’s machine learning systems, the knowledge gap between the machine learning and privacy communities must be bridged. This article aims to provide an introduction to the intersection of both fields with special emphasis on the techniques used to protect the data. Read More

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