CrowdSFL: A secure crowd computing framework based on blockchain and federated learning

Abstract

Over the years, the flourish of crowd computing has enabled enterprises to accomplish computing tasks through crowdsourcing in a large-scale and high-quality manner, and therefore how to efficiently and securely implement crowd computing becomes a hotspot. Some recent work innovatively adopted a P2P (peer-to-peer) network as the communication environment of crowdsourcing. Based on its decentralized control, issues like single-point-of-failure or DDoS attack can be overcome to some extent, but the huge computing capacity and storage costs required by this scheme is always unbearable. Federated learning is a distributed machine learning that supports local storage of data, and clients implement training through interactive gradient values. In our work, we combine blockchain with federated learning and propose a crowdsourcing framework named CrowdSFL, that users can implement crowdsourcing with less overhead and higher security. In addition, to protect the privacy of participants, we design a new re-encryption algorithm based on Elgamal to ensure that interactive values and other information will not be exposed to other participants outside the workflow. Finally, we have proved through experiments that our framework is superior to some similar work in accuracy, efficiency, and overhead.