Privacy-Preserving Verifiable CNNs

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as one of the most successful deep learning approaches to image recognition and classification. A recent line of research, which includes zkCNN (ACM CCS ’21), vCNN (Cryptology ePrint Archive), and ZEN (Cryptology ePrint Archive), aims at protecting the privacy of CNN models by developing publicly verifiable proofs of correct classification which do not leak any information about the underlying CNN models themselves. A shared feature of these schemes is that they require the entity constructing the proof to have access to both the model and the input in the clear. In other words, a client holding a potentially sensitive input is required to reveal this input to the entity holding the CNN model, thereby sacrificing his privacy, to be able to obtain a verifiable proof of correct classification. This is in contrast to the security guarantees provided by secure classification considered in privacy-preserving machine learning, which does not require the client to reveal his input to obtain a (non-verifiable) classification. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving verifiable CNN scheme that overcomes this limitation of the previous schemes by allowing the client to obtain a classification proof without having to reveal his input. The obtained proof allows the client to selectively reveal properties of the obtained classification and his input, which will be verifiable to any third-party verifier. Our scheme is based on the recent notion of collaborative zk-SNARKs by Ozdemir and Boneh (USENIX ’22). Specifically, we construct a new collaborative zk-SNARK based on Bulletproofs achieving an efficient maliciously secure proof generation protocol. Based on this, we then present an optimized approach to CNN evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by measuring the performance of our scheme on a CNN for classifying the MNIST dataset.