TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 15 Jun 2026] TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations Rutger Hendrix, Leonardo G. Russo, Concetto Spampinato, Matteo Pennisi, Giovanni Bellitto The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2606.17122 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.17122v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.17122 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Rutger Hendrix [view email] [v1] Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:46:31 UTC (748 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)