MammothDP: Private Boosted Decision Trees Ready for Trusted Hardware and Leakage-free Hyperparameters

arXiv:2611.14317v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Data spaces like the European Health Data Space (EHDS) require the protection of sensitive data in studies during the data’s processing and the study’s release alike. In this work, we investigate how to implement this mandate using established trusted execution environments (TEEs) and timing side-channel hardening to protect the processing even under a compromised server, and the state-of-the-art differential privacy (DP) notion to protect the release of studies on tabular data. This combined setup could seem to complete the picture, but in fact raises unexpected security challenges that we mitigate by introducing MammothDP: a significant milestone towards a holistic machine learning system based on the recent gradient boosted decision tree learner S-BDT that is provably DP if used within a privacy filter, timing side-channel hardened, and deployed on a TEE. To achieve a strong privacy-utility tradeoff, we introduce two novel components: an early stopping criterion that adaptively selects the number of trees without any privacy overhead, and an improved rollback protection that is no longer vulnerable under timing side-channel attacks.