Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Private Machine Learning

Project description

Making sure our private data stays private

Our browsing history is not private. Massive amounts of data are being collected by internet giants. EU data protection rules, however, guarantee the protection of our personal data whenever these are collected. To enhance privacy in the digital era, the EU-funded PRIMAL project will speed up secure computation in practice. Its first task will be private classification (where one party holds a model trained on a sensitive data set and another holds a sample and wishes to evaluate the model on that private sample). The second task covers federated learning that enables thousands of participants to train a neural network on joint data. Specifically, the project will improve specific cryptographic building blocks and apply them for these applications.

Objective

Machine learning algorithms are data-hungry, and perform better when exposed to more and more data. Such data is being collected in massive amounts by internet giants, and is often sensitive and private. Examples include the purchases and browsing history of users, their health data and exercise activity, locations they travel to and messages they type into their mobile phone. The amount of data being collected can be significantly reduced using cryptographic techniques, in particular, using secure multiparty computation. Secure computation enables mutually distrustful parties to compute a joint function of their inputs without revealing the inputs to one another.

In this research, we will address secure computation techniques of machine learning tasks. The first task is private classification: One party holds a model trained on a sensitive dataset, and another party holds a sample and wishes to evaluate the model on that private sample. Our objective is to fulfill this task while achieving significantly stronger security notion than previous works, that is, security even if one of the parties deviates from the protocol specifications (malicious security). The second task is federated learning, a techniques that enables thousands of participants to train a neural network on their joint data but without revealing the data to one another. However, a recent work showed that such task is susceptible to injection of backdoors, and a user can manipulate the joint model to his/her own benefit, significantly reducing the usefulness of federated learning in practice. Our objective is to guarantee immunity to such injections. The two objectives will be achieved by improving specific cryptographic building blocks, and applying them for these applications.

PRIMAL will speed up secure computation in practice, and carries immense potential to enhance privacy in the digital era.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2019

See all projects funded under this call

Coordinator

BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 185 464,32
Address
BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY CAMPUS
52900 Ramat Gan
Israel

See on map

Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 185 464,32
My booklet 0 0