Secure Social Recommendation based on Secret Sharing

Nowadays, privacy preserving machine learning has been drawing much attention in both industry and academy. Meanwhile, recommender systems have been extensively adopted by many commercial platforms (e.g. Amazon) and they are mainly built based on user-item interactions. Besides, social platforms (e.g. Facebook) have rich resources of user social information. It is well known that social information, which is rich on social platforms such as Facebook, are useful to recommender systems. It is anticipated to combine the social information with the user-item ratings to improve the overall recommendation performance. Most existing recommendation models are built based on the assumptions that the social information are available. However, different platforms are usually reluctant to (or cannot) share their data due to certain concerns. In this paper, we first propose a SEcure SOcial RECommendation (SeSoRec) framework which can (1) collaboratively mine knowledge from social platform to improve the recommendation performance of the rating platform, and (2) securely keep the raw data of both platforms. We then propose a Secret Sharing based Matrix Multiplication (SSMM) protocol to optimize SeSoRec and prove its correctness and security theoretically. By applying minibatch gradient descent, SeSoRec has linear time complexities in terms of both computation and communication. The comprehensive experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SeSoRec and SSMM.