Hush! Protecting Secrets During Model Training: An Indistinguishability Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ganesh, Arun, McMahan, Brendan, Nasr, Milad, Steinke, Thomas, Thakurta, Abhradeep
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ganesh, Arun
McMahan, Brendan
Nasr, Milad
Steinke, Thomas
Thakurta, Abhradeep
author_facet Ganesh, Arun
McMahan, Brendan
Nasr, Milad
Steinke, Thomas
Thakurta, Abhradeep
contents We consider the problem of secret protection, in which a business or organization wishes to train a model on their own data, while attempting to not leak secrets potentially contained in that data via the model. The standard method for training models to avoid memorization of secret information is via differential privacy (DP). However, DP requires a large loss in utility or a large dataset to achieve its strict privacy definition, which may be unnecessary in our setting where the data curator and data owner are the same entity. We propose an alternate definition of secret protection that instead of targeting DP, instead targets a bound on the posterior probability of secret reconstruction. We then propose and empirically evaluate an algorithm for model training with this secret protection definition. Our algorithm solves a linear program to assign weights to examples based on the desired per-secret protections, and then performs Poisson sampling using these weights. We show our algorithm significantly outperforms the baseline of running DP-SGD on the whole dataset.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00201
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hush! Protecting Secrets During Model Training: An Indistinguishability Approach
Ganesh, Arun
McMahan, Brendan
Nasr, Milad
Steinke, Thomas
Thakurta, Abhradeep
Cryptography and Security
We consider the problem of secret protection, in which a business or organization wishes to train a model on their own data, while attempting to not leak secrets potentially contained in that data via the model. The standard method for training models to avoid memorization of secret information is via differential privacy (DP). However, DP requires a large loss in utility or a large dataset to achieve its strict privacy definition, which may be unnecessary in our setting where the data curator and data owner are the same entity. We propose an alternate definition of secret protection that instead of targeting DP, instead targets a bound on the posterior probability of secret reconstruction. We then propose and empirically evaluate an algorithm for model training with this secret protection definition. Our algorithm solves a linear program to assign weights to examples based on the desired per-secret protections, and then performs Poisson sampling using these weights. We show our algorithm significantly outperforms the baseline of running DP-SGD on the whole dataset.
title Hush! Protecting Secrets During Model Training: An Indistinguishability Approach
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00201