Siddharth Garg

This research was led by Brandon Reagen, assistant professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering, with Nandan Kumar Jha, a Ph.D. student under Reagen, and Zahra Ghodsi, who obtained her Ph.D. at NYU Tandon under Siddharth Garg, Institute associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Concerns surrounding data privacy are having an influence on how companies are changing the way they use and store users’ data. Additionally, lawmakers are passing legislation to improve users’ privacy rights. Deep learning is the core driver of many applications impacted by privacy concerns. It provides high utility in classifying, recommending, and interpreting user data to build user experiences and requires large amounts of private user data to do so. Private inference (PI) is a solution that simultaneously provides strong privacy guarantees while preserving the utility of neural networks to power applications.

Homomorphic data encryption, which allows inferences to be made directly on encrypted data, is a solution that addresses the rise of privacy concerns for personal, medical, military, government and other sensitive information. However, the primary challenge facing private inference is that computing on encrypted data levies an impractically high penalty on latency, stemming mostly from non-linear operators like ReLU (rectified linear activation function).

Solving this challenge requires new optimization methods that minimize network ReLU counts while preserving accuracy. One approach is minimizing the use of ReLU by eliminating uses of this function that do little to contribute to the accuracy of inferences.

“What we are to trying to do there is rethink how neural nets are designed in the first place,” said Reagen. “You can skip a lot of these time and computationally-expensive ReLU operations and still get high performing networks at 2 to 4 times faster run time.”

The team proposed DeepReDuce, a set of optimizations for the judicious removal of ReLUs to reduce private inference latency. The researchers tested this by dropping ReLUs from classic networks to significantly reduce inference latency while maintaining high accuracy.

The team found that, compared to the state-of-the-art for private inference DeepReDuce improved accuracy and reduced ReLU count by up to 3.5% (iso-ReLU count) and 3.5× (iso-accuracy), respectively.

The work extends an innovation, called CryptoNAS. Described in an earlier paper whose authors include Ghodsi and a third Ph.D. student, Akshaj Veldanda, CryptoNAS optimizes the use of ReLUs as one might rearrange how rocks are arranged in a stream to optimize the flow of water: it rebalances the distribution of ReLUS in the network and removes redundant ReLUs.

The investigators will present their work on DeepReDuce at the 2021 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) from July 18-24, 2021.

This research was led by Siddharth Garg, Institute Associate Professor of electrical and computer engineering, and included Benjamin Tan, a research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Kang Liu, a Ph.D. student.  

Machine learning (ML) systems are being proposed for use in domains that can affect our day-to-day lives, including face expression recognition systems. Because of the need for privacy, users will look to use privacy preservation tools, typical produced by a third party. To this end, generative adversarial neural networks (GANs) have been proposed for generating or manipulating images. Versions of these systems called “privacy-preserving GANs” (PP-GANs) are designed to sanitize sensitive data (e.g., images of human faces) so that only application-critical information is retained while private attributes, such as the identity of a subject, are removed — by, for example, preserving facial expressions while replacing other identifying information.

Such ML-based privacy tools have potential applications in other privacy sensitive domains such as to remove location-relevant information from vehicular camera data; obfuscate the identity of a person who produced a handwriting sample; or remove barcodes from images. In the case of GANs, the complexity involved in training such models suggests the outsourcing of GAN training in order to achieve PP-GANs functionality.

To measure the privacy-preserving performance of PP-GANs researchers typically use empirical metrics of information leakage to demonstrate the (in)ability of deep learning (DL)-based discriminators to identify secret information from sanitized images. Noting that empirical metrics are dependent on discriminators’ learning capacities and training budgets, Garg and his collaborators argue that such privacy checks lack the necessary rigor for guaranteeing privacy.

In the paper “Subverting Privacy-Preserving GANs: Hiding Secrets in Sanitized Images,” the team formulated an adversarial setting to "stress-test" whether empirical privacy checks are sufficient to guarantee protection against private data recovery from data that has been “sanitized” by a PP-GAN. In doing so, they showed that PP-GAN designs can, in fact, be subverted to pass privacy checks, while still allowing secret information to be extracted from sanitized images.

While the team’s adversarial PP-GAN passed all existing privacy checks, it actually hid secret data pertaining to the sensitive attributes, even allowing for reconstruction of the original private image. They showed that the results have both foundational and practical implications, and that stronger privacy checks are needed before PP-GANs can be deployed in the real-world.

“From a practical stand-point, our results sound a note of caution against the use of data sanitization tools, and specifically PP-GANs, designed by third-parties,” explained Garg.

The study, which will be presented at the virtual 35^th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, provides background on PP-GANs and associated empirical privacy checks; formulates an attack scenario to ask if empirical privacy checks can be subverted, and outlines an approach for circumventing empirical privacy checks.

• The team provides the first comprehensive security analysis of privacy-preserving GANs and demonstrate that existing privacy checks are inadequate to detect leakage of sensitive information. 

• Using a novel steganographic approach, they adversarially modify a state-of-the-art PP-GAN to hide a secret (the user ID), from purportedly sanitized face images. 

• They show that their proposed adversarial PP-GAN can successfully hide sensitive attributes in “sanitized” output images that pass privacy checks, with 100% secret recovery rate. 


“Our experimental results highlighted the insufficiency of existing DL-based privacy checks, and potential risks of using untrusted third-party PP-GAN tools,” said Garg, in the study.