Confidential multi-stakeholder machine learning (ML) allows multiple parties
to perform collaborative data analytics while not revealing their intellectual
property, such as ML source code, model, or datasets. State-of-the-art
solutions based on homomorphic encryption incur a large performance overhead.
Hardware-based solutions, such as trusted execution environments (TEEs),
significantly improve the performance in inference computations but still
suffer from low performance in training computations, e.g., deep neural
networks model training, because of limited availability of protected memory
and lack of GPU support.
To address this problem, we designed and implemented Perun, a framework for
confidential multi-stakeholder machine learning that allows users to make a
trade-off between security and performance. Perun executes ML training on
hardware accelerators (e.g., GPU) while providing security guarantees using
trusted computing technologies, such as trusted platform module and integrity
measurement architecture. Less compute-intensive workloads, such as inference,
execute only inside TEE, thus at a lower trusted computing base. The evaluation
shows that during the ML training on CIFAR-10 and real-world medical datasets,
Perun achieved a 161x to 1560x speedup compared to a pure TEE-based approach.