Towards the AlexNet Moment for Homomorphic Encryption: HCNN, the First Homomorphic CNN on Encrypted Data With GPUs

Deep Learning as a Service (DLaaS) stands as a promising solution for cloud-based inference applications. In this setting, the cloud has a pre-learned model whereas the user has samples on which she wants to run the model. The biggest concern with DLaaS is the user privacy if the input samples are sensitive data. We provide here an efficient privacy-preserving system by employing high-end technologies such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). FHE, with its widely-known feature of computing on encrypted data, empowers a wide range of privacy-concerned applications. This comes at high cost as it requires enormous computing power. In this article, we show how to accelerate the performance of running CNNs on encrypted data with GPUs. We evaluated two CNNs to classify homomorphically the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. Our solution achieved sufficient security level (> 80 >80 bit) and reasonable classification accuracy (99) and (77.55 percent) for MNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively. In terms of latency, we could classify an image in 5.16 seconds and 304.43 seconds for MNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively. Our system can also classify a batch of images (> > 8,000) without extra overhead.