Reliable and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning with Anomalous Users

Abstract: Recently, various privacy-preserving schemes have been proposed to resolve privacy issues in federated learning (FL). However, most of them ignore the fact that anomalous users holding low-quality data may reduce the accuracy of trained models. Although some existing works manage to solve this problem, they either lack privacy protection for users’ sensitive information or introduce a two-cloud model that is difficult to find in reality. A reliable and privacy-preserving FL scheme named reliable and privacy-preserving federated learning (RPPFL) based on a single-cloud model is proposed. Specifically, inspired by the truth discovery technique, we design an approach to identify the user’s reliability and thereby decrease the impact of anomalous users. In addition, an additively homomorphic cryptosystem is utilized to pro⁃ vide comprehensive privacy preservation (user’s local gradient privacy and reliability privacy). We give rigorous theoretical analysis to show the security of RPPFL. Based on open datasets, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that RPPEL compares favorably with exist⁃ ing works in terms of efficiency and accuracy.

Keywords: federated learning; anomalous user; privacy preservation; reliability; homomorphic cryptosystem