Efficient Verifiable Protocol for Privacy-Preserving Aggregation in Federated Learning

Abstract

Federated learning has gained extensive interest in recent years owing to its ability to update model parameters without obtaining raw data from users, which makes it a viable privacy-preserving machine learning model for collaborative distributed learning among various devices. However, due to the fact that adversaries can track and deduce private information about users from shared gradients, federated learning is vulnerable to numerous security and privacy threats. In this work, a communication-efficient protocol for secure aggregation of model parameters in a federated learning setting is proposed where training is done on user devices while the aggregated trained model could be constructed on the server side without revealing the raw data of users. The proposed protocol is robust against users’ dropouts, and it enables each user to independently validate the aggregated result supplied by the server. The suggested protocol is secure in an honest-but-curious environment, and privacy is maintained even if the majority of parties are in collusion. A practical scenario for the proposed setting is discussed. Additionally, a simulation of the protocol is evaluated, and results demonstrate that it outperforms one of the state-of-art protocols, especially when the number of dropouts increases.