Securing Classifiers Against Both White-Box and Black-Box Attacks using Encrypted-Input Obfuscation

Machine Learning as a Service (aka MLaaS) and Smart Grid as a Service (aka SGaaS) are expected to grow at a significant rate. Just like most cloud services, MLaaS and SGaaS can be subject to a number of attacks. In this paper, we focus on white-box attacks (informally defined as attacks that try to access some or all internal data or computation used by the service program), and black-box attacks (informally defined as attacks only use input-output access to the attacked service program).

We consider a participant model including a setup manager, a cloud server, and one or many data producers. The cloud server runs a machine learning classifier trained on a dataset provided by the setup manager and classifies new input data provided by the data producers. Applications include analytics over data received by distributed sensors, such as, for instance, in a typical SGaaS environment. We propose a new security notion of encrypted-input classifier obfuscation as a set of algorithms that, in the above participant and algorithm model, aims to protect the cloud server's classifier program from both white-box and black-box attacks. This notion builds on cryptographic obfuscation of programs [1], cryptographic obfuscation of classifiers [2], and encrypted-input obfuscation of programs [3]. We model classifiers as a pair of programs: a training program that on input a dataset and secret data values, returns classification parameters, and a classification program that on input classification parameters, and a new input data value, returns a classification result. A typical execution goes as follows. During obfuscation generation, the setup manager randomly chooses a key k and sends a k-based obfuscation of the classifier to the cloud server, and sends to the data producers either k or information to generate k-based input data encryptions. During obfuscation evaluation, the data producers send k-based input data encryptions to the cloud server, which evaluates the obfuscated classifier over the encrypted input data. Here, the goal is to protect the confidentiality of the dataset, the secret data, and the classification parameters.

One can obtain a general-purpose encrypted-input classifier obfuscator in two steps: 1) transforming a suitable composition of training and classification algorithms into a single boolean circuit; 2) applying to this circuit the result from saying that [3] a modification of Yao's protocol[4] is an encrypted-input obfuscation of gate values in any polynomial-size boolean circuit. This result is of only theoretical relevance. Towards finding a practically efficient obfuscation of specific classifiers, we note that techniques from [3] can be used to produce an obfuscator for decision trees. Moreover, in recent results we have produced an obfuscator for image matching (i.e., matching an input image to a secret image).