Privacy-Preserving ML with Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract:
In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, the commitment to data privacy and intellectual property protection during Machine Learning operations has become a foundational necessity for society and businesses handling sensitive data. This is especially critical in sectors such as healthcare and finance, where ensuring confidentiality and safeguarding proprietary information are not just ethical imperatives but essential business requirements.

This presentation goes into the role of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), based on the open-source library Concrete ML, in advancing secure and privacy-preserving ML applications.

We begin with an overview of Concrete ML, emphasizing how practical FHE for ML was made possible. This sets the stage for discussing how FHE is applied to ML inference, demonstrating its capability to perform secure inference on encrypted data across various models. After inference, we speak about another important FHE application, the FHE training and how encrypted data from multiple sources can be used for training without compromising individual user's privacy.

FHE has lots of synergies with other technologies, in particular Federated Learning: we show how this integration strengthens privacy-preserving features of ML models during the full pipeline, training and inference.

Finally, we address the application of FHE in generative AI and the development of Hybrid FHE models (which are the subject of our RSA 2024 presentation). This approach represents a strategic balance between intellectual property protection, user privacy and computational performance, offering solutions to the challenges of securing one of the most important AI applications of our times.

Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91841471370

Bios
Jordan Frery is a research scientist and engineer in machine learning at Zama. As a researcher, he published in different application domains such as fraud detection, author verification, and risk prediction. He holds a PhD in machine learning and has worked in the field for 8+ years, as a data and research scientist. His current work at Zama focuses on bridging the gap between machine learning and fully homomorphic encryption, with the goal of applying machine learning techniques to encrypted data.

Benoit Chevallier-Mames is a security engineer and researcher serving as VP of Cloud & Machine Learning at Zama. He has spent 20+ years between cryptographic research and secure implementations in a wide range of domains such as side-channel security, provable security, whitebox cryptography, and fully homomorphic encryption. Prior to Zama, he securely implemented public-key algorithms on smartcards in Gemplus for seven years, worked for the French governmental ANSSI agency for one year, and then designed and developed whitebox implementations at Apple for 12 years. Benoit has co-written 15+ peer-reviewed papers and is the co-author of 50+ patents. He holds a PhD from Ecole Normale Superieure / Paris University and a master's degree from CentraleSupelec.