Privacy-preserving matrix factorization

Recommender systems typically require users to reveal their ratings to a recommender service, which subsequently uses them to provide relevant recommendations. Revealing ra-tings has been shown to make users susceptible to a broad set of inference attacks, allowing the recommender to learn private user attributes, such as gender, age, etc. In this work, we show that a recommender can profile items with-out ever learning the ratings users provide, or even which items they have rated. We show this by designing a system that performs matrix factorization, a popular method used in a variety of modern recommendation systems, through a cryptographic technique known as garbled circuits. Our design uses oblivious sorting networks in a novel way to leverage sparsity in the data. This yields an efficient im-plementation, whose running time is Θ(M log2M) in the number of ratings M. Crucially, our design is also highly parallelizable, giving a linear speedup with the number of available processors. We further fully implement our sys-tem, and demonstrate that even on commodity hardware with 16 cores, our privacy-preserving implementation can factorize a matrix with 10K ratings within a few hours