PrivPy: Enabling Scalable and General Privacy-Preserving Computation

We introduce PrivPy, a practical privacy-preserving collaborative computation framework. PrivPy provides an easy-to-use and highly compatible Python programming front-end which supports high-level array operations and different secure computation engines to allow for security assumptions and performance trade-offs. We also design and implement a new secret-sharing-based computation engine with highly efficient protocols for private arithmetics over real numbers: a fast secure multiplication protocol, a garbled-circuit-based secure comparison protocol, and optimized array/matrix operations that are essential for big data applications. PrivPy provides provable privacy and supports general computation. We demonstrate the scalability of PrivPy using machine learning models (e.g. logistic regression and convolutional neural networks) and real-world datasets (including a 5000-by-1-million private matrix).