CCBNet: Confidential Collaborative Bayesian Networks Inference

Effective large-scale process optimization in manufacturing industries requires close cooperation between different human expert parties who encode their knowledge of related domains as Bayesian network models. For instance, Bayesian networks for domains such as lithography equipment, processes, and auxiliary tools must be conjointly used to effectively identify process optimizations in the semiconductor industry. However, business confidentiality across domains hinders such collaboration, and encourages alternatives to centralized inference. We propose CCBNet, the first Confidentiality-preserving Collaborative Bayesian Networks inference framework. CCBNet leverages secret sharing to securely perform analysis on the combined knowledge of party models by joining two novel subprotocols: (i) CABN, which augments probability distributions for variables across parties by modeling them into secret shares of their normalized combination; and (ii) SAVE, which aggregates party inference result shares through distributed variable elimination. We extensively evaluate CCBNet via 9 public Bayesian networks. Our results show that CCBNet achieves predictive quality that is similar to the ones of centralized methods while preserving model confidentiality. We further demonstrate that CCBNet scales to challenging manufacturing use cases that involve 16–128 parties in large networks of 223–1003 variables, and decreases, on average, computational overhead by 23%, while communicating 71k values per request. Finally, we showcase possible attacks and mitigations for partially reconstructing party networks in the protocol.