RLSA-PFL: Robust Lightweight Secure Aggregation with Model Inconsistency Detection in Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

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Nazatul H. Sultan, Yan Bo, Yansong Gao, Seyit Camtepe, Arash Mahboubi, Hang Thanh Bui, Aufeef Chauhan, Hamed Aboutorab, Michael Bewong, Praveen Gauravaram, Md. Rafiqul Islam, Sharif Abuadbba

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 23 Jan 2026CoRR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple users to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing raw data, making it suitable for privacy-sensitive applications. However, local model or weight updates can still leak sensitive information. Secure aggregation protocols mitigate this risk by ensuring that only the aggregated updates are revealed. Among these, single-setup protocols, where key generation and exchange occur only once, are the most efficient due to reduced communication and computation overhead. However, existing single-setup protocols often lack support for dynamic user participation and do not provide strong privacy guarantees such as forward and backward secrecy. \par In this paper, we present a novel secure aggregation protocol that requires only a single setup for the entire FL training. Our protocol supports dynamic user participation, tolerates dropouts, and achieves both forward and backward secrecy. It leverages lightweight symmetric homomorphic encryption with a key negation technique to mask updates efficiently, eliminating the need for user-to-user communication. To defend against model inconsistency attacks, we introduce a low-overhead verification mechanism using message authentication codes (MACs). We provide formal security proofs under both semi-honest and malicious adversarial models and implement a full prototype. Experimental results show that our protocol reduces user-side computation by up to $99\%$ compared to state-of-the-art protocols like e-SeaFL (ACSAC'24), while maintaining competitive model accuracy. These features make our protocol highly practical for real-world FL deployments, especially on resource-constrained devices.