SoK: systematizing 58 cryptographic private transformer inference frameworks
chaumian · x · 2026-09-15
A Chinese University of Hong Kong SoK paper systematizes 58 cryptographic private transformer inference frameworks (2022–2026) across three interacting levels: systems (execution & optimization), models (crypto–ML co-design), and cryptography.
Key findings:
- Optimizations do not transfer unchanged across execution phases when they require values not yet available; data-dependent pruning, cache management, routing and sparsity demand the private execution structure be hidden, constrained, predicted, or disclosed.
- Against an output-only baseline, 5 frameworks exhibit four classes of security concerns; composition boundaries in maliciously secure designs are synthesized.
- 16 frameworks rely on empirically calibrated or distribution-specific mechanisms and 21 require additional training, limiting generalization and comparability.
- The paper distills 12 open problems and 16 outlooks spanning protocol efficiency, cross-level co-design, dynamic execution, security, evaluation, and scalability.
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