PPMI: Privacy-Preserving LLM Interaction with Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Databases

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Bae, Yubeen, Kim, Minchan, Lee, Jaejin, Kim, Sangbum, Kim, Jaehyung, Choi, Yejin, Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911245281525760
author Bae, Yubeen
Kim, Minchan
Lee, Jaejin
Kim, Sangbum
Kim, Jaehyung
Choi, Yejin
Mireshghallah, Niloofar
author_facet Bae, Yubeen
Kim, Minchan
Lee, Jaejin
Kim, Sangbum
Kim, Jaehyung
Choi, Yejin
Mireshghallah, Niloofar
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as personal agents, accessing sensitive user data such as calendars, emails, and medical records. Users currently face a trade-off: They can send private records, many of which are stored in remote databases, to powerful but untrusted LLM providers, increasing their exposure risk. Alternatively, they can run less powerful models locally on trusted devices. We bridge this gap. Our Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning first sends a generic, non-private user query to a powerful, untrusted LLM, which generates a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompt and detailed sub-queries without accessing user data. Next, we embed these sub-queries and perform encrypted sub-second semantic search using our Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Database across one million entries of a single user's private data. This represents a realistic scale of personal documents, emails, and records accumulated over years of digital activity. Finally, we feed the CoT prompt and the decrypted records to a local language model and generate the final response. On the LoCoMo long-context QA benchmark, our hybrid framework, combining GPT-4o with a local Llama-3.2-1B model, outperforms using GPT-4o alone by up to 7.1 percentage points. This demonstrates a first step toward systems where tasks are decomposed and split between untrusted strong LLMs and weak local ones, preserving user privacy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17336
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PPMI: Privacy-Preserving LLM Interaction with Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Databases
Bae, Yubeen
Kim, Minchan
Lee, Jaejin
Kim, Sangbum
Kim, Jaehyung
Choi, Yejin
Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as personal agents, accessing sensitive user data such as calendars, emails, and medical records. Users currently face a trade-off: They can send private records, many of which are stored in remote databases, to powerful but untrusted LLM providers, increasing their exposure risk. Alternatively, they can run less powerful models locally on trusted devices. We bridge this gap. Our Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning first sends a generic, non-private user query to a powerful, untrusted LLM, which generates a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompt and detailed sub-queries without accessing user data. Next, we embed these sub-queries and perform encrypted sub-second semantic search using our Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Database across one million entries of a single user's private data. This represents a realistic scale of personal documents, emails, and records accumulated over years of digital activity. Finally, we feed the CoT prompt and the decrypted records to a local language model and generate the final response. On the LoCoMo long-context QA benchmark, our hybrid framework, combining GPT-4o with a local Llama-3.2-1B model, outperforms using GPT-4o alone by up to 7.1 percentage points. This demonstrates a first step toward systems where tasks are decomposed and split between untrusted strong LLMs and weak local ones, preserving user privacy.
title PPMI: Privacy-Preserving LLM Interaction with Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Databases
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17336