CryptoRec: Novel Collaborative Filtering Recommender Made Privacy-Preserving Easy

Abstract

With the explosive growth of user data, recommenders have become increasingly complicated. State-of-the-art algorithms often have high computational complexity and heavily use non-linear transformations. This fact makes the privacy-preserving problem more challenging, despite the significant advances in cryptography. To alleviate this problem, we propose a privacy-friendly recommender, CryptoRec. It only relies on additions and multiplications, which are efficiently supported by most cryptographic primitives. Different from others, in CryptoRec, the parameter space only contains item features (user features can be directly computed from the item features). This property allows CryptoRec to, (1) naturally achieve transferability if two datasets share the same item entries, which can benefit differential privacy protection; (2) directly estimate the preference of new users whose data is not included in the training set, drastically improving recommendation efficiency. We first evaluate CryptoRec on three real-world datasets. The evaluation results show that the accuracy is competitive with state-of-the-art. Then, we build differential privacy into CryptoRec and leverage its transferability property to reduce the overall privacy loss. Lastly, we demonstrate the simplicity and efficiency of using CryptoRec to construct secure recommendation protocols based on homomorphic encryption schemes. Our results show that CryptoRec outperforms existing solutions in terms of both accuracy a…