Private Parameter Aggregation for Federated Learning

K. R. Jayaram, Ashish Verma

Abstract: Federated learning enables multiple distributed participants (potentially on different datacenters or clouds) to collaborate and train machine/deep learning models by sharing parameters or gradients. However, sharing gradients, instead of centralizing data, may not be as private as one would expect. Reverse engineering attacks on plain text gradients have been demonstrated to be practically feasible. This problem has been made more insidious by the fact that participants or aggregators may reverse engineer model parameters while participating honestly in the protocol (the so-called honest, but curious trust model). Existing solutions for differentially private federated learning, while promising, lead to less accurate models and require nontrivial hyperparameter tuning. In this chapter, we (1) describe various trust models in federated learning and their challenges, (2) explore the use of secure multi-party computation techniques in federated learning, (3) explore how additive homomorphic encryption can be used efficiently for federated learning, (4) compare these techniques with others like the addition of differentially private noise and the use of specialized hardware, and (5) illustrate these techniques through real-world examples.