Protecting Sensitive Data in AI/ML Applications

ai ai security ai/ml differential privacy federated learning secure multi-party computation (smpc) sensitive data Jun 20, 2025

Ensuring your data is safe and secure.

Businesses are exploring AI more and more in an effort to remain ahead of the curve. They are testing out different AI models to see how they might affect people and businesses.

But there are drawbacks to this investigation, especially when it comes to AI and data privacy.

Businesses must carefully manage data privacy legislation and privacy-preserving strategies since AI models rely on enormous datasets, which frequently contain sensitive or personal information.

In this blog post, we examine how companies can manage generative AI data privacy by putting in place efficient governance systems.

Why Is AI Data Security Necessary?

The foundation of AI applications is data. Artificial intelligence (AI) models cannot work well without high-quality, properly maintained data. Many businesses are currently having trouble fulfilling these criteria. Executives have long placed a high premium on data security, particularly in data-intensive companies, and the stakes are even higher with AI.

Data security has historically been required to:

  • Safeguard sensitive and proprietary data, such as financial records, trade secrets, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information (PII).
  • Preserve client trust since any data breach, particularly one involving customer data, damages reputation and trust, which eventually affects customer retention.
  • Assure adherence to current and future data protection laws and AI compliance rules, such as GDPR and HIPAA.
  • Assure business continuity to fend against assaults and ensure that, in the case of a breach, its effects on operations are as small as possible while it is being mitigated.

Risks including data exposure, data breaches, social engineering, phishing attempts, ransomware, and cloud data loss can result from not protecting your data infrastructure.

Businesses get a competitive edge when AI systems are incorporated and become a significant differentiation. Therefore, keeping an advantage in the rapidly evolving technological ecosystem of today requires ensuring AI data protection.

Best Practices for AI Model Security

  1. Differential Privacy:

In order to solve this, differential privacy (DP) adds noise to the data, makes sure that individual data points cannot be identified or deduced from aggregated data, and preserves system privacy while permitting data collection and analysis.

There are numerous uses for differential privacy in a variety of fields, including business, social research, healthcare, and education. Differential privacy, for instance, allows researchers to examine patient medical records for insights while maintaining patient privacy.

While enabling teachers to assess students’ performance, differential privacy can also be utilized to safeguard the confidentiality of test results. Differential privacy enables companies to customize their services while safeguarding the privacy of their clients’ preferences.

The following are some benefits of differential privacy:

  • It offers a strict and measurable privacy metric that is unaffected by the adversary’s past knowledge and processing capacity.
  • It is robust to composition, which means that basic rules can be used to combine the privacy guarantees of several differentially private algorithms.
  • Because of its adaptability and flexibility, it may be used with many kinds of data, techniques, and situations.

Differential privacy promises to preserve the privacy and dignity of the people whose data it contains while allowing data analysis and use for positive outcomes like research, innovation, and personalization.

By offering a precise and measurable definition of privacy, a flexible and adaptive framework for creating privacy-preserving algorithms, and a clear and meaningful definition of privacy, differential privacy offers a morally sound and useful method of balancing the trade-off between privacy and utility.

  • Federated Learning:

Federated learning provides a means of unlocking information to feed new AI applications while training AI models without anyone seeing or touching your data. The recommendation engines, chatbots, and spam filters that have made artificial intelligence a commonplace in contemporary life were developed using data—hundreds of training samples that were either supplied by users in exchange for free music, email, or other benefits, or scraped from the internet.

A large number of these AI programs were trained using data that was collected and processed in one location. However, modern AI is moving in the direction of a decentralized strategy. On the edge, people are working together to train new AI models with data that never leaves your mobile device, laptop, or private server.

 

Federated learning is a new type of AI training that is quickly becoming the norm for processing and storing private data in order to comply with a number of new requirements. Federated learning also provides a means of accessing the raw data coming from sensors on satellites, bridges, machines, and an increasing number of smart gadgets on our bodies and in our homes by processing data at its source.

Building global AI models for numerous stakeholders with various interests is the goal of federated learning. FL processes data from the location where it guarantees the security of sensitive data and models, as opposed to collecting and merging data from several locations and assembling them in one central location.

  • Homomorphic Encryption:

Homomorphic encryption ensures security and privacy by allowing calculations on encrypted material without first decrypting it. It is essential for edge AI systems, such as self-driving cars, smart homes, and medical equipment, that handle sensitive data locally. Partially homomorphic encryption (PHE) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) are the two primary forms of homomorphic encryption. PHE permits encrypted data to be added or multiplied, but not both. FHE is slower and more complicated, but it allows any computation on encrypted data.

The following are the main advantages of homomorphic encryption for edge AI:

  • Enhanced Security: Processing keeps data encrypted, lowering the possibility of a data leak.
  • Privacy Preservation: Carries out calculations on encrypted data to stop data exploitation.
  • Secure Data Sharing: Permits cloud and edge devices to securely share encrypted data.
  • Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC):

The concept of secret sharing is the foundation of SMPC, in which each party divides its contribution into arbitrary portions and distributes them to the other parties. Then, using certain protocols that protect the privacy of the shares, the parties carry out various operations on their shares, including addition, multiplication, and comparison. Lastly, without knowing anything more about the inputs, the parties combine their shares to get the function’s output. Any function that can be represented as a circuit of arithmetic or logical gates can be calculated using SMPC.

For AI models, SMPC can provide a host of benefits, including security, privacy, and compliance. For example, SMPC can stop harmful attacks and tamper with the data or model, as well as safeguard the confidentiality of the data and the model from unauthorized access or leakage.

Furthermore, SMPC may assist in fulfilling the moral and legal obligations of privacy and data protection laws like GDPR and HIPAA. Without compromising their security or privacy, consumers can now manage their own data and give their permission for it to be used in AI models.

 

For AI models, SMPC poses several difficulties, including those related to scalability, efficiency, and complexity. For example, SMPC calls for complex cryptographic algorithms and protocols that might be challenging to develop, put into practice, and validate.

The AI model may experience increased overhead and delay as a result. Furthermore, as compared to normal AI models, SMPC may use more memory and computing time, as well as more bandwidth and network traffic.

Furthermore, too many participants, too much data, or too sophisticated operations can make SMPC impracticable.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras sed sapien quam. Sed dapibus est id enim facilisis, at posuere turpis adipiscing. Quisque sit amet dui dui.

Call To Action

Stay connected with news and updates!

Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.
Don't worry, your information will not be shared.

We hate SPAM. We will never sell your information, for any reason.