Previous studies have found that an adversary attacker can often infer
unintended input information from intermediate-layer features. We study the
possibility of preventing such adversarial inference, yet without too much
accuracy degradation. We propose a generic method to revise the neural network
to boost the challenge of inferring input attributes from features, while
maintaining highly accurate outputs. In particular, the method transforms
real-valued features into complex-valued ones, in which the input is hidden in
a randomized phase of the transformed features. The knowledge of the phase acts
like a key, with which any party can easily recover the output from the
processing result, but without which the party can neither recover the output
nor distinguish the original input. Preliminary experiments on various datasets
and network structures have shown that our method significantly diminishes the
adversary's ability in inferring about the input while largely preserves the
resulting accuracy.