VPFLI: Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning With Irregular Users Based on Single Server

Yanli Ren, Yerong Li, Guorui Feng, Xinpeng Zhang

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is widely used in neural network-based deep learning, which allows multiple users to jointly train a model without disclosing their data. However, the data quality of the users is not uniform, and some users with poor computing ability and outdated equipments called irregular ones may collect low-quality data and thus reduce the accuracy of the global model. In addition, the untrusted server may return wrong aggregation results to cheat the users. To solve these problems, we propose a verifiable privacy-preserving FL protocol with irregular users (VPFLI) based on single server. The protocol is privacy-preserving for the untrusted server and it is proved secure based on drop-tolerant homomorphic encryption. For low-quality datasets, their proportion would be decreased in the aggregation results in order to ensure the accuracy of the global model. Also, the aggregation results can be effectively verified by the users based on linear homomorphic hash. Moreover, VPFLI is proposed based on single server, which is more applicable in reality compare with the previous ones based on two non-colluding servers. The experiments show that VPFLI improves the accuracy of the model from 83.5% to 91.5% based on MNIST dataset compared to the traditional FL protocols.