AHEC: End-to-end Compiler Framework for Privacy-preserving Machine Learning Acceleration

Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) is driven by the emerging adoption of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS). In a typical MLaaS system, the end-user sends his personal data to the service provider and receives the corresponding prediction output. However, such interaction raises severe privacy concerns about both the user's proprietary data and the server's ML model. PPML integrates cryptographic primitives such as Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and/or Homomorphic Encryption (HE) into ML services to resolve the privacy issue. However, existing PPML solutions have not been widely deployed in practice since: (i) Privacy protection comes at the cost of additional computation and/or communication overhead; (ii) Adapting PPML to different front-end frameworks and back-end hardware incurs prohibitive engineering cost.We propose AHEC, the first automated, end-to-end HE compiler for efficient PPML inference. Leveraging the capability of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), AHEC enables automated generation and optimization of HE kernels across diverse types of hardware platforms and ML frameworks. We perform extensive experiments to investigate the performance of AHEC from different abstraction levels: HE operations, HE-based ML kernels, and neural network layers. Empirical results corroborate that AHEC achieves superior runtime reduction compared to the state-of-the-art solutions built from static HE libraries.