The amount of personal data collected in our everyday interactions with
connected devices offers great opportunities for innovative services fueled by
machine learning, as well as raises serious concerns for the privacy of
individuals. In this paper, we propose a massively distributed protocol for a
large set of users to privately compute averages over their joint data, which
can then be used to learn predictive models. Our protocol can find a solution
of arbitrary accuracy, does not rely on a third party and preserves the privacy
of users throughout the execution in both the honest-but-curious and malicious
adversary models. Specifically, we prove that the information observed by the
adversary (the set of maliciours users) does not significantly reduce the
uncertainty in its prediction of private values compared to its prior belief.
The level of privacy protection depends on a quantity related to the Laplacian
matrix of the network graph and generally improves with the size of the graph.
Furthermore, we design a verification procedure which offers protection against
malicious users joining the service with the goal of manipulating the outcome
of the algorithm.