Homomorphically encrypted CIFAR-10 inference in 200ms

https://sofar.belfortlabs.cloud/

16•j2kun•3h ago

Comments

smalltorch•2h ago

It's pretty confident this calculator is a cat.

https://i.postimg.cc/90WGjk8t/results.png

What's the use case for this?

malcolmgreaves•1h ago

From the webpage:

> Image classification without the server seeing the image.

The value is in being able to get the prediction from the model without ever giving unencrypted data to somebody you don’t trust.

You could have an LLM generate code for you without ever giving the operator your proprietary source code.

furkanturan•59m ago

Consider encrypted AI. You ask a question under encryption. The remote calculates the answer, which is still under encryption. This is the critical point; the remote cannot see the question and answer. It only calculates. Once you receive the answer, you decrypt it and see the answer; only you see the answer.

smalltorch•51m ago

Ah, that sounds impossible. Good luck, sir...Also, who wants this if you can just run a local model?

furkanturan•41m ago

Thanks a lot. Though encrypted AI chat bot is not far ahead, do not think of that as the primary target of today. Instead, there are many untapped applications (e.g. inter-bank transfers, industry, healthcare) where regulations, privacy laws and compliance requirements restrict institutions from touching data. These will initially be our key enablers, and over time we hope to extend the range of applications.

smalltorch•12m ago

Have you considered that maybe the computation itself on the private data, no matter how you put it, even if encrypted, was designed to protect the consumer?

I.E., gaining any sort of insight a transaction of protected information is what the protections were in place for.

So is FHE more about skirting regulations and privacy laws? Or, is it a new frontier of an untapped data source that has some red tape around it?

To me, something was simply not encrypted properly if you are able to draw conclusions/learn insights/detect anything about the data. It's in conflict with the idea of what secure encryption means to me.

j2kun•5m ago

> gaining any sort of insight

The server providing the FHE-based service does not gain any sort of insight. This is a key point: only the client can see the output of the computation.

simcop2387•39m ago

sambejk•51m ago

I think calculator is not part of the labels in cifar-10. Pretty normal as it has ‘only’ 90% accuracy. Things could improve quickly though

jcs•12m ago

That 90% only measures images already known to be one of CIFAR-10’s ten classes. There is no “none of the above,” so even a perfect benchmark score would still force a calculator into one of those labels.

jszymborski•59m ago

Big if true! One of the caveats here is that the file size seems to balloon 341 times.

monster_truck•27m ago

That's a exceptional tradeoff. Even 3000x is noteworthy as long as processing time does not go to the moon wrt HE/FHE

Sajarin•9m ago

They have a bit more info on their announcement blog post[0]

> Belfort today released the "so far" CIFAR demo, an encrypted implementation of ResNet-20, a popular model for image classification. It outperforms recent SOTA by 3x with a total latency of less than 200ms

Not many details on how they've done this, so I'm a bit skeptical. Fast HE is a holy grail.

> Belfort's image classification is built on top of its upcoming GPU library, Cyclops. It comes with several optimizations that make Cyclops extremely fast on Encrypted AI workloads.

Looks like a lead up to an upcoming library release

[0] https://belfortlabs.com/blog/sofar

rcr-anti•6m ago

Looked at the network logs and the JS, did some testing, there's a caveat here. For an encryption demo you might expect your secrets to be generated locally, they do the compute on something they can't read, you compare their results to your original plaintext; (imo at least) the point would be that it isn't physically possible for them to cheat.

Here, you literally download client_secret.bin from their server, so they have control over the keys and evaluators. So two things. First, the per user key flow would be several minutes for per user keys, the evaluator bundle would be in the 100s MB to GB realm. Second, there's no way for us to tell the difference between them really doing FHE or decrypting with the key. To be clear, not evidence it's fake, just not total proof it's real. Really hope it's real, been a field I've been following for awhile.

deckar01•2m ago

I think they only trained on dogs with floppy ears, because it is very confident the German Shepherd is a cat.

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