The privacy of data is a major challenge in machine learning as a trained
model may expose sensitive information of the enclosed dataset. Besides, the
limited computation capability and capacity of edge devices have made
cloud-hosted inference inevitable. Sending private information to remote
servers makes the privacy of inference also vulnerable because of susceptible
communication channels or even untrustworthy hosts. In this paper, we target
privacy-preserving training and inference of brain-inspired Hyperdimensional
(HD) computing, a new learning algorithm that is gaining traction due to its
light-weight computation and robustness particularly appealing for edge devices
with tight constraints. Indeed, despite its promising attributes, HD computing
has virtually no privacy due to its reversible computation. We present an
accuracy-privacy trade-off method through meticulous quantization and pruning
of hypervectors, the building blocks of HD, to realize a differentially private
model as well as to obfuscate the information sent for cloud-hosted inference.
Finally, we show how the proposed techniques can be also leveraged for
efficient hardware implementation.