A Survey and Guideline on Privacy Enhancing Technologies for Collaborative Machine Learning

Abstract

As machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) are becoming more popular and advanced, there is a wish to turn sensitive data into valuable information via ML/AI techniques revealing only data that is allowed by concerned parties or without revealing any information about the data to third parties. Collaborative ML approaches like federated learning (FL) help tackle these needs and concerns, bringing a way to use sensitive data without disclosing critically sensitive features of that data. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of state of the art for collaborative ML approaches from a privacy perspective. A detailed threat model and security and privacy considerations are given for each collaborative method. We deeply analyze Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), covering secure multi-party computation (SMPC), homomorphic encryption (HE), differential privacy (DP), and confidential computing (CC) in the context of collaborative ML. We introduce a guideline on the selection of the privacy preserving technologies for collaborative ML and privacy practitioners. This study constitutes the first survey to provide an in-depth focus on collaborative ML requirements and constraints for privacy solutions while also providing guidelines on the selection of PETs.

Keywords

• Collaborative machine learning
• privacy enhancing technologies
• privacy
• security
• federated learning
• artificial intelligence