MOBIUS: Model-Oblivious Binarized Neural Networks

A privacy-preserving framework in which a computational resource provider receives encrypted data from a client and returns prediction results without decrypting the data, i.e., oblivious neural network or encrypted prediction, has been studied in machine learning that provides prediction services. In this work, we present MOBIUS (Model-Oblivious BInary neUral networkS), a new system that combines Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) and secure computation based on secret sharing as tools for scalable and fast privacy-preserving machine learning. BNNs improve computational performance by binarizing values in training to $-1$ and $+1$, while secure computation based on secret sharing provides fast and various computations under encrypted forms via modulo operations with a short bit length. However, combining these tools is not trivial because their operations have different algebraic structures and the use of BNNs downgrades prediction accuracy in general. MOBIUS uses improved procedures of BNNs and secure computation that have compatible algebraic structures without downgrading prediction accuracy. We created an implementation of MOBIUS in C++ using the ABY library (NDSS 2015). We then conducted experiments using the MNIST dataset, and the results show that MOBIUS can return a prediction within 0.76 seconds, which is six times faster than SecureML (IEEE S\&P 2017). MOBIUS allows a client to request for encrypted prediction and allows a trainer to obliviously publish an encrypted model to a cloud provided by a computational resource provider, i.e., without revealing the original model itself to the provider.