Fusion: Efficient and Secure Inference Resilient to Malicious Servers

TL;DR

Fusion provides a fast, secure inference method that verifies model accuracy and prevents malicious server deviations without heavy cryptography, enabling scalable, privacy-preserving machine learning inference.

Contribution

It introduces Fusion, a novel approach that ensures server honesty and model accuracy verification in secure inference without relying on expensive cryptographic techniques.

Findings

Fusion is 48.06× faster than existing malicious secure inference protocols.

Fusion reduces communication by 30.90× compared to prior methods.

It enables ImageNet-scale inference with ResNet50 in under 9 minutes.

Abstract

In secure machine learning inference, most of the schemes assume that the server is semi-honest (honestly following the protocol but attempting to infer additional information). However, the server may be malicious (e.g., using a low-quality model or deviating from the protocol) in the real world. Although a few studies have considered a malicious server that deviates from the protocol, they ignore the verification of model accuracy (where the malicious server uses a low-quality model) meanwhile preserving the privacy of both the server's model and the client's inputs. To address these issues, we propose \textit{Fusion}, where the client mixes the public samples (which have known query results) with their own samples to be queried as the inputs of multi-party computation to jointly perform the secure inference. Since a server that uses a low-quality model or deviates from the protocol can only produce results that can be easily identified by the client, \textit{Fusion} forces the server to behave honestly, thereby addressing all those aforementioned issues without leveraging expensive cryptographic techniques. Our evaluation indicates that \textit{Fusion} is 48.06$\times$ faster and uses 30.90$\times$ less communication than the existing maliciously secure inference protocol (which currently does not support the verification of the model accuracy). In addition, to show the scalability, we conduct ImageNet-scale inference on the practical ResNet50 model and it costs 8.678 minutes and 10.117 GiB of communication in a WAN setting, which is 1.18$\times$ faster and has 2.64$\times$ less communication than those of the semi-honest protocol.