Matrix Sketching for Secure Collaborative Machine Learning

Collaborative machine learning (ML), also known as federated ML, allows participants to jointly train a model without data sharing. To update the model parameters, the central parameter server broadcasts model parameters to the participants, and the participants send ascending directions such as gradients to the server. While data do not leave a participant's device, the communicated gradients and parameters will leak a participant's privacy. Prior work proposed attacks that infer participant's privacy from gradients and parameters, and they showed simple defenses like dropout and differential privacy do not help much. To defend privacy leakage, we propose a method called Double Blind Collaborative Learning (DBCL) which is based on random matrix sketching. The high-level idea is to apply a random transformation to the parameters, data, and gradients in every iteration so that the existing attacks will fail or become less effective. While it improves the security of collaborative ML, DBCL does not increase the computation and communication cost much and does not hurt prediction accuracy at all. DBCL can be potentially applied to decentralized collaborative ML to defend privacy leakage.