Privacy-Enhanced Federated Learning: A Restrictively Self-Sampled and Data-Perturbed Local Differential Privacy Method

Abstract

As a popular distributed learning framework, federated learning (FL) enables clients to conduct cooperative training without sharing data, thus having higher security and enjoying benefits in processing large-scale, high-dimensional data. However, by sharing parameters in the federated learning process, the attacker can still obtain private information from the sensitive data of participants by reverse parsing. Local differential privacy (LDP) has recently worked well in preserving privacy for federated learning. However, it faces the inherent problem of balancing privacy, model performance, and algorithm efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-enhanced federated learning framework (Optimal LDP-FL) which achieves local differential privacy protection by the client self-sampling and data perturbation mechanisms. We theoretically analyze the relationship between the model accuracy and client self-sampling probability. Restrictive client self-sampling technology is proposed which eliminates the randomness of the self-sampling probability settings in existing studies and improves the utilization of the federated system. A novel, efficiency-optimized LDP data perturbation mechanism (Adaptive-Harmony) is also proposed, which allows an adaptive parameter range to reduce variance and improve model accuracy. Comprehensive experiments on the MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets show that the proposed method can significantly reduce computational and communication costs with the same level of privacy and model utility.