Panther: A Cost-Effective Privacy-Preserving Framework for GNN Training and Inference Services in Cloud Environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Congcong, Liu, Xinyu, Huang, Kaifeng, Wei, Lifei, Shi, Yang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Congcong
Liu, Xinyu
Huang, Kaifeng
Wei, Lifei
Shi, Yang
author_facet Chen, Congcong
Liu, Xinyu
Huang, Kaifeng
Wei, Lifei
Shi, Yang
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have marked significant impact in traffic state prediction, social recommendation, knowledge-aware question answering and so on. As more and more users move towards cloud computing, it has become a critical issue to unleash the power of GNNs while protecting the privacy in cloud environments. Specifically, the training data and inference data for GNNs need to be protected from being stolen by external adversaries. Meanwhile, the financial cost of cloud computing is another primary concern for users. Therefore, although existing studies have proposed privacy-preserving techniques for GNNs in cloud environments, their additional computational and communication overhead remain relatively high, causing high financial costs that limit their widespread adoption among users. To protect GNN privacy while lowering the additional financial costs, we introduce Panther, a cost-effective privacy-preserving framework for GNN training and inference services in cloud environments. Technically, Panther leverages four-party computation to asynchronously executing the secure array access protocol, and randomly pads the neighbor information of GNN nodes. We prove that Panther can protect privacy for both training and inference of GNN models. Our evaluation shows that Panther reduces the training and inference time by an average of 75.28% and 82.80%, respectively, and communication overhead by an average of 52.61% and 50.26% compared with the state-of-the-art, which is estimated to save an average of 55.05% and 59.00% in financial costs (based on on-demand pricing model) for the GNN training and inference process on Google Cloud Platform.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01654
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Panther: A Cost-Effective Privacy-Preserving Framework for GNN Training and Inference Services in Cloud Environments
Chen, Congcong
Liu, Xinyu
Huang, Kaifeng
Wei, Lifei
Shi, Yang
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have marked significant impact in traffic state prediction, social recommendation, knowledge-aware question answering and so on. As more and more users move towards cloud computing, it has become a critical issue to unleash the power of GNNs while protecting the privacy in cloud environments. Specifically, the training data and inference data for GNNs need to be protected from being stolen by external adversaries. Meanwhile, the financial cost of cloud computing is another primary concern for users. Therefore, although existing studies have proposed privacy-preserving techniques for GNNs in cloud environments, their additional computational and communication overhead remain relatively high, causing high financial costs that limit their widespread adoption among users. To protect GNN privacy while lowering the additional financial costs, we introduce Panther, a cost-effective privacy-preserving framework for GNN training and inference services in cloud environments. Technically, Panther leverages four-party computation to asynchronously executing the secure array access protocol, and randomly pads the neighbor information of GNN nodes. We prove that Panther can protect privacy for both training and inference of GNN models. Our evaluation shows that Panther reduces the training and inference time by an average of 75.28% and 82.80%, respectively, and communication overhead by an average of 52.61% and 50.26% compared with the state-of-the-art, which is estimated to save an average of 55.05% and 59.00% in financial costs (based on on-demand pricing model) for the GNN training and inference process on Google Cloud Platform.
title Panther: A Cost-Effective Privacy-Preserving Framework for GNN Training and Inference Services in Cloud Environments
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01654