Protecting machine learning systems using blockchain: solutions, challenges and future prospects

Machine learning-based systems have emerged as the primary means for achieving the highest levels of productivity and efficiency. They have become the most influential competitive factor for many technologies and business companies such as Cloud AI Companies (Google, Facebook…) and Health Care AI Companies (Tempus, Nanox …). However, privacy and security issues have become the biggest challenge facing all ML applications. These threats are known as Adversarial Machine Learning (AML). Their main goal is to maliciously manipulate training data and model parameters to obtain misleading results. To overcome these challenges, several research studies have proven that Blockchain, which relies on cryptographic technologies, constitutes a promising solution for securing ML applications. It provides high guarantees to make the system scalable, reliable and more secure. In this survey, we provide an overview of ML applications and the most hostile attacks they face. Then, we define the blockchain technique and its distinctive features. After that, we conduct a comprehensive and detailed survey of the latest and best blockchain-based research to address security issues in ML applications (integrity, confidentiality and availability). We analyze, compare and comment on all the proposed solutions.

In the end, we discuss in detail the various challenges that hinder the adoption of blockchain technology and we extract the most important scientific trends that will serve as guidance and support for researchers in their future works.