Efficient secure aggregation for privacy-preserving federated learning based on secret sharing

Abstract

Federated learning allows multiple mobile participants to jointly train a global model without revealing their local private data. Communication-computation cost and privacy preservation are key fundamental issues in federated learning. Existing secret sharing-based secure aggregation mechanisms for federated learning still suffer from significant additional costs, insufficient privacy preservation, and vulnerability to participant dropouts. In this paper, we aim to solve these issues by introducing flexible and effective secret sharing mechanisms into federated learning. We propose two novel privacy-preserving federated learning schemes: federated learning based on one-way secret sharing (FLOSS) and federated learning based on multishot secret sharing (FLMSS). Compared with the state-of-the-art works, FLOSS enables high privacy preservation while significantly reducing the communication cost by dynamically designing secretly shared content and objects. Meanwhile, FLMSS further reduces the additional cost and has the ability to efficiently enhance the robustness of participant dropouts in federated learning. Foremost, FLMSS achieves a satisfactory tradeoff between privacy preservation and communication-computation cost. Security analysis and performance evaluations on real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed schemes in terms of model accuracy, privacy preservation, and cost reduction.