Privacy-Preserving Distributed Deep Learning via Homomorphic Re-Encryption

The flourishing deep learning on distributed training datasets arouses worry about data privacy. The recent work related to privacy-preserving distributed deep learning is based on the assumption that the server and any learning participant do not collude. Once they collude, the server could decrypt and get data of all learning participants. Moreover, since the private keys of all learning participants are the same, a learning participant must connect to the server via a distinct TLS/SSL secure channel to avoid leaking data to other learning participants. To fix these problems, we propose a privacy-preserving distributed deep learning scheme with the following improvements: (1) no information is leaked to the server even if any learning participant colludes with the server; (2) learning participants do not need different secure channels to communicate with the server; and (3) the deep learning model accuracy is higher. We achieve them by introducing a key transform server and using homomorphic re-encryption in asynchronous stochastic gradient descent applied to deep learning. We show that our scheme adds tolerable communication cost to the deep learning system, but achieves more security properties. The computational cost of learning participants is similar. Overall, our scheme is a more secure and more accurate deep learning scheme for distributed learning participants.