Toward Secure and Privacy-Preserving Distributed Deep Learning in Fog-Cloud Computing

Fog-cloud computing promises many new vertical service areas beyond simple data communication, storing, and processing. Among them, distributed deep learning (DDL) across fog-cloud computing environment is one of the most popular applications due to its high efficiency and scalability. Compared with the centralized deep learning, DDL can provide better privacy protection with training only on sharing parameters. Nevertheless, when DDL meets fog-cloud computing, it still faces two major security challenges: 1) how to protect users' privacy from being leaked to other internal participants in the training process and 2) how to guarantee users' identities from being forged by external adversaries. To combat them, several approaches have been proposed via various technologies. Nevertheless, those approaches suffer from drawbacks in terms of security, efficiency, and functionality, and cannot guarantee the legitimacy of participants' identities during training. In this article, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving DDL (SPDDL) for fog-cloud computing. Compared with the state-of-the-art works, our proposal achieves a better tradeoff between security, efficiency, and functionality. In addition, our SPDDL can guarantee the unforgeability of users' identities against external adversaries. Extensive experimental results indicate the practical feasibility and high efficiency of our SPDDL. © 2014 IEEE.