DHSA: efficient doubly homomorphic secure aggregation for cross-silo federated learning

Abstract

Secure aggregation is widely used in horizontal federated learning (FL), to prevent the leakage of training data when model updates from data owners are aggregated. Secure aggregation protocols based on homomorphic encryption (HE) have been utilized in industrial cross-silo FL systems, one of the settings involved with privacy-sensitive organizations such as financial or medical, presenting more stringent requirements on privacy security. However, existing HE-based solutions have limitations in efficiency and security guarantees against colluding adversaries without a Trust Third Party. This paper proposes an efficient Doubly Homomorphic Secure Aggregation (DHSA) scheme for cross-silo FL, which utilizes multi-key homomorphic encryption (MKHE) and seed homomorphic pseudorandom generator (SHPRG) as cryptographic primitives. The application of MKHE provides strong security guarantees against up to \(N-2\) participates colluding with the aggregator, with no TTP required. To mitigate the large computation and communication cost of MKHE, we leverage the homomorphic property of SHPRG to replace the majority of MKHE computation by computationally friendly mask generation from SHPRG, while preserving the security. Overall, the resulting scheme satisfies the stringent security requirements of typical cross-silo FL scenarios, at the same time providing high computation and communication efficiency for practical usage. We experimentally demonstrate that our scheme brings a speedup to 20\(\times \) over the state-of-the-art HE-based secure aggregation and reduces the traffic volume to approximately 1.5\(\times \) inflation over the plain learning setting.