Efficient federated unlearning under plausible deniability

Abstract

Privacy regulations like the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in the US allow users the right to remove their data from machine learning (ML) applications. Machine unlearning addresses this by modifying the ML parameters in order to forget the influence of a specific data point on its weights. Recent literature has highlighted that the contribution from data point(s) can be forged with some other data points in the dataset with probability close to one. This allows a server to falsely claim unlearning without actually modifying the model’s parameters. However, in distributed paradigms such as federated learning (FL), where the server lacks access to the dataset and the number of clients are limited, claiming unlearning in such cases becomes a challenge. An honest server must modify the model parameters in order to unlearn. This paper introduces an efficient way to achieve machine unlearning in FL, i.e., federated unlearning, by employing a privacy model which allows the FL server to plausibly deny the client’s participation in the training up to a certain extent. Specifically, we demonstrate that the server can generate a Proof-of-Deniability, where each aggregated update can be associated with at least x (the plausible deniability parameter) client updates. This enables the server to plausibly deny a client’s participation. However, in the event of frequent unlearning requests, the server is required to adopt an unlearning strategy and, accordingly, update its model parameters. We also perturb the client updates in a cluster in order to avoid inference from an honest but curious server. We show that the global model satisfies (ϵ,δ)-differential privacy after T number of communication rounds. The proposed methodology has been evaluated on multiple datasets in different privacy settings. The experimental results show that our framework achieves comparable utility while providing a significant reduction in terms of memory (≈ 30 times), as well as retraining time (1.6-500769 times). The source code for the paper is available https://github.com/Ayush-Umu/Federated-Unlearning-under-Plausible-Deniability.