Research

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows parties to perform computations on data while keeping that data private. This capability has great potential for machine-learning applications: it facilitates training of machine-learning models on private data sets owned by different parties, evaluation of one party’s private model using another party’s private data, etc. Although a range of studies implement machine-learning models via secure MPC, such implementations are not yet mainstream. Adoption of secure MPC is hampered by the absence of flexible software frameworks that “speak the language” of machine-learning researchers and engineers. To foster adoption of secure MPC in machine learning, we present CRYPTEN: a software framework that exposes popular secure MPC primitives via abstractions that are common in modern machine-learning frameworks, such as tensor computations, automatic differentiation, and modular neural networks. This paper describes the design of CRYPTEN and measure its performance on state-of-the-art models for text classification, speech recognition, and image classification. Our benchmarks show that CRYPTEN’s GPU support and high-performance communication between (an arbitrary number of) parties allows it to perform efficient private evaluation of modern machine-learning models under a semi-honest threat model. For example, two parties using CRYPTEN can securely predict phonemes in speech recordings using Wav2Letter faster than real-time. We hope that CRYPTEN will spur adoption of secure MPC in the machine-learning community.