VSAF: Verifiable and Secure Aggregation Scheme for Federated Learning in Edge Computing

Shiwen Zhang1, 2, Feixiang Ren1, 2, Wei Liang1, 2, Kuanching Li1, 2 and Al-Sakib Khan Pathan3

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hunan University of Science and Technology
    Xiangtan 411201, China
  2. Sanya Research Institute, Hunan University of Science and Technology
    Sanya 572024, China
    shiwenzhang@hnu.edu.cn, rfx.point@mail.hnust.edu.cn, wliang@hnust.edu.cn, aliric@hnust.edu.cn
  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, United International University
    Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh
    spathan@ieee.org

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) has gained attention for its promising privacy protection. In FL, clients train local gradients on their data without sharing raw data to update the global model. However, security issues persist. Attackers can infer original data from local gradients, compromising privacy, while a malicious cloud server may tamper with uploaded parameters, leading to incorrect aggregation. Considering this, we focus on the above issues in FL: (1) privacy protection of the parameters uploaded by clients and (2) verification of the correctness of the aggregated result from a cloud server. In response to these issues, this article proposes VSAF, a verifiable and secure aggregation scheme for federated learning in edge computing. Using a linear homomorphic hash function, we design a lightweight verification algorithm for aggregated gradients. To protect gradient privacy, we combine the Bloom filter and Shamir’s secret sharing to design a single masking protocol. Detailed analyses and experiments demonstrate the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

Key words

Federated Learning, Privacy-preserving, Correctness Verification, Edge Computing

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS250221057Z

How to cite

Zhang, S., Ren, F., Liang, W., Li, K., Pathan, A. K.: VSAF: Verifiable and Secure Aggregation Scheme for Federated Learning in Edge Computing. Computer Science and Information Systems, https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS250221057Z