What is Concrete ML?
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Concrete ML is an open source, privacy-preserving, machine learning inference framework based on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). It enables data scientists without any prior knowledge of cryptography to automatically turn machine learning models into their FHE equivalent, using familiar APIs from scikit-learn and PyTorch (see how it looks for linear models, tree-based models, and neural networks).
Fully Homomorphic Encryption is an encryption technique that allows computing directly on encrypted data, without needing to decrypt it. With FHE, you can build private-by-design applications without compromising on features. You can learn more about FHE in this introduction or by joining the FHE.org community.
Here is a simple example of classification on encrypted data using logistic regression. More examples can be found here.
This example shows the typical flow of a Concrete ML model:
The model is trained on unencrypted (plaintext) data using scikit-learn. As FHE operates over integers, Concrete ML quantizes the model to use only integers during inference.
The quantized model is compiled to an FHE equivalent. Under the hood, the model is first converted to a Concrete Python program, then compiled.
Inference can then be done on encrypted data. The above example shows encrypted inference in the model-development phase. Alternatively, during deployment in a client/server setting, the data is encrypted by the client, processed securely by the server, and then decrypted by the client.
To make a model work with FHE, the only constraint is to make it run within the supported precision limitations of Concrete ML (currently 16-bit integers). Thus, machine learning models must be quantized, which sometimes leads to a loss of accuracy versus the original model, which operates on plaintext.
Additionally, Concrete ML currently only supports FHE inference. Training has to be done on unencrypted data, producing a model which is then converted to an FHE equivalent that can perform encrypted inference (i.e., prediction over encrypted data).
Finally, there is currently no support for pre-processing model inputs and post-processing model outputs. These processing stages may involve text-to-numerical feature transformation, dimensionality reduction, KNN or clustering, featurization, normalization, and the mixing of results of ensemble models.
These issues are currently being addressed, and significant improvements are expected to be released in the coming months.
Concrete ML is built on top of Zama's Concrete.
Various tutorials are available for built-in models and deep learning. Several stand-alone demos for use cases can be found in the Demos and Tutorials section.
If you have built awesome projects using Concrete ML, feel free to let us know and we'll link to your work!
Support forum: https://community.zama.ai (we answer in less than 24 hours).
Live discussion on the FHE.org Discord server: https://discord.fhe.org (inside the #concrete channel).
Do you have a question about Zama? Write us on Twitter or send us an email at: hello@zama.ai