With the increase of COVID-19 cases worldwide, an effective way is required to diagnose COVID-19 patients. The primary problem in diagnosing COVID-19 patients is the shortage and reliability of testing kits, due to the quick spread of the virus, medical practitioners are facing difficulty identifying the positive cases. The second real-world problem is to share the data among the hospitals globally while keeping in view the privacy concerns of the organizations. Building a collaborative model and preserving privacy are major concerns for training a global deep learning model. This paper proposes a framework that collects a small amount of data from different sources (various hospitals) and trains a global deep learning model using blockchain based federated learning. Blockchain technology authenticates the data and federated learning trains the model globally while preserving the privacy of the organization. First, we propose a data normalization technique that deals with the heterogeneity of data as the data is gathered from different hospitals having different kinds of CT scanners. Secondly, we use Capsule Network-based segmentation and classification to detect COVID-19 patients. Thirdly, we design a method that can collaboratively train a global model using blockchain technology with federated learning while preserving privacy. Additionally, we collected real-life COVID-19 patients data, which is, open to the research community. The proposed framework can utilize up-to-date data which improves the recognition of computed tomography (CT) images. Finally, our results demonstrate a better performance to detect COVID-19 patients.
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Hainan University（海南大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
AI plays an important role in COVID-19 identification. Computer vision and deep learning techniques can assist in determining COVID-19 infection with Chest X-ray Images. However, for the protection and respect of the privacy of patients, the hospital's specific medical-related data did not allow leakage and sharing without permission. Collecting such training data was a major challenge. To a certain extent, this has caused a lack of sufficient data samples when performing deep learning approaches to detect COVID-19. Federated Learning is an available way to address this issue. It can effective…
Deep learning is effective in diagnosing COVID-19 and requires a large amount of data to be effectively trained. Due to data and privacy regulations, hospitals generally have no access to data from other hospitals. Federated learning (FL) has been used to solve this problem, where it utilizes a distributed setting to train models in hospitals in a privacy-preserving manner. Deploying FL is not always feasible as it requires high computation and network communication resources. This paper evaluates five FL algorithms' performance and resource efficiency for Covid-19 detection. A decentralized s…
Coronavirus (COVID-19) has shown an unprecedented global crisis by the detrimental effect on the global economy and health. The number of COVID-19 cases has been rapidly increasing, and there is no sign of stopping. It leads to a severe shortage of test kits and accurate detection models. A recent study demonstrated that the chest X-ray radiography outperformed laboratory testing in COVID-19 detection. Therefore, using chest X-ray radiography analysis can help to screen suspected COVID-19 cases at an early stage. Moreover, the patient data is sensitive, and it must be protected to avoid reveal…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；China Telecommunications Corporation（中国电信集团有限公司）
Medical health care centers are envisioned as a promising paradigm to handle the massive volume of data of COVID-19 patients using artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, AI techniques often require centralized data collection and training the model in a single organization, which is most common weakness due to the privacy and security of raw data communication. To solve this challenging task, we propose a blockchain-based federated learning framework that provides collaborative data training solutions by coordinating multiple hospitals to train and share encrypted federated models withou…
JP Morgan Chase（摩根大通）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Chest Computational Tomography (CT) scans present low cost, speed and objectivity for COVID-19 diagnosis and deep learning methods have shown great promise in assisting the analysis and interpretation of these images. Most hospitals or countries can train their own models using in-house data, however empirical evidence shows that those models perform poorly when tested on new unseen cases, surfacing the need for coordinated global collaboration. Due to privacy regulations, medical data sharing between hospitals and nations is extremely difficult. We propose a GAN-augmented federated learning m…
A decentralized federated learning architecture is proposed to apply to the Businesses-to-Businesses scenarios by introducing the consortium blockchain in this paper. We introduce a model verification mechanism to ensure the quality of local models trained by participators. To analyze the latency of the system, a latency model is constructed by considering the work flow of the architecture. Finally the experiment results show that our latency model does well in quantifying the actual delays.
To address COVID-19 healthcare challenges, we need frequent sharing of health data, knowledge and resources at a global scale. However, in this digital age, data privacy is a big concern that requires the secure embedding of privacy assurance into the design of all technological solutions that use health data. In this paper, we introduce differential privacy by design (dPbD) framework and discuss its embedding into the federated machine learning system. To limit the scope of our paper, we focus on the problem scenario of COVID-19 imaging data privacy for disease diagnosis by computer vision an…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；WeBank Co. Ltd.（微众银行股份有限公司）
Federated learning has been widely studied and applied to various scenarios. In mobile computing scenarios, federated learning protects users from exposing their private data, while cooperatively training the global model for a variety of real-world applications. However, the security of federated learning is increasingly being questioned, due to the malicious clients or central servers' constant attack to the global model or user privacy data. To address these security issues, we proposed a decentralized federated learning framework based on blockchain, i.e., a Blockchain-based Federated Lear…
Over the recent years, Federated machine learning continues to gain interest and momentum where there is a need to draw insights from data while preserving the data provider's privacy. However, one among other existing challenges in the adoption of federated learning has been the lack of fair, transparent and universally agreed incentivization schemes for rewarding the federated learning contributors. Smart contracts on a blockchain network provide transparent, immutable and independently verifiable proofs by all participants of the network. We leverage this open and transparent nature of smar…
Federated learning is an emerging privacy-preserving AI technique where clients (i.e., organisations or devices) train models locally and formulate a global model based on the local model updates without transferring local data externally. However, federated learning systems struggle to achieve trustworthiness and embody responsible AI principles. In particular, federated learning systems face accountability and fairness challenges due to multi-stakeholder involvement and heterogeneity in client data distribution. To enhance the accountability and fairness of federated learning systems, we pre…
Royal Military College of Canada（加拿大皇家军事学院）；Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学）
Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning technique that addresses the privacy challenges in terms of access rights of local datasets by enabling the training of a model across nodes holding their data samples locally. To achieve decentralized federated learning, blockchain-based FL was proposed as a distributed FL architecture. In decentralized FL, the chief is eliminated from the learning process as workers collaborate between each other to train the global model. Decentralized FL applications need to account for the additional delay incurred by blockchain-based FL deployments. Particula…
Federated Learning is a promising machine learning paradigm when multiple parties collaborate to build a high-quality machine learning model. Nonetheless, these parties are only willing to participate when given enough incentives, such as a fair reward based on their contributions. Many studies explored Shapley value based methods to evaluate each party's contribution to the learned model. However, they commonly assume a semi-trusted server to train the model and evaluate the data owners' model contributions, which lacks transparency and may hinder the success of federated learning in practice…
ConsenSys Health；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学伯曼生物伦理研究所）
We propose a novel architecture for federated learning within healthcare consortia. At the heart of the solution is a unique integration of privacy preserving technologies, built upon native enterprise blockchain components available in the Ethereum ecosystem. We show how the specific characteristics and challenges of healthcare consortia informed our design choices, notably the conception of a new Secure Aggregation protocol assembled with a protected hardware component and an encryption toolkit native to Ethereum. Our architecture also brings in a privacy preserving audit trail that logs eve…
Polytechnic Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学理工学院）；School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学软件学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University（浙江大学公共管理学院）
Federated learning(FL) is a rapidly growing field and many centralized and decentralized FL frameworks have been proposed. However, it is of great challenge for current FL frameworks to improve communication performance and maintain the security and robustness under malicious node attacks. In this paper, we propose Galaxy Federated Learning Framework(GFL), a decentralized FL framework based on blockchain. GFL introduces the consistent hashing algorithm to improve communication performance and proposes a novel ring decentralized FL algorithm(RDFL) to improve decentralized FL performance and ban…
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Virginia Commonwealth University（弗吉尼亚联邦大学）
Despite the great potential of Federated Learning (FL) in large-scale distributed learning, the current system is still subject to several privacy issues due to the fact that local models trained by clients are exposed to the central server. Consequently, secure aggregation protocols for FL have been developed to conceal the local models from the server. However, we show that, by manipulating the client selection process, the server can circumvent the secure aggregation to learn the local models of a victim client, indicating that secure aggregation alone is inadequate for privacy protection. …
BRFL: A Blockchain-based Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning Model
Key Laboratory of Beijing Network Technology, Beihang University（北京网络技术重点实验室，北京航空航天大学）；Guangxi Collaborative Innovation Center of Multi-Source Information Integration and Intelligent Processing, Guangxi Normal University（广西多源信息整合与智能处理协同创新中心，广西师范大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry（轻工业学院计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Beihang University（网络安全科学与技术学院，北京航空航天大学）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Computer Software Evaluating and Testing（上海计算机软件评测测试重点实验室）
Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）；Southern Illinois University（南伊利诺伊大学）
Federated Learning (FL) has gained widespread popularity in recent years due to the fast booming of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence along with emerging security and privacy threats. FL enables efficient model generation from local data storage of the edge devices without revealing the sensitive data to any entities. While this paradigm partly mitigates the privacy issues of users' sensitive data, the performance of the FL process can be threatened and reached a bottleneck due to the growing cyber threats and privacy violation techniques. To expedite the proliferation of F…
The rapid expansion of data worldwide invites the need for more distributed solutions in order to apply machine learning on a much wider scale. The resultant distributed learning systems can have various degrees of centralization. In this work, we demonstrate our solution FLoBC for building a generic decentralized federated learning system using blockchain technology, accommodating any machine learning model that is compatible with gradient descent optimization. We present our system design comprising the two decentralized actors: trainer and validator, alongside our methodology for ensuring r…
Université de Sherbrooke（舍布鲁克大学）；GREYC CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心灰西实验室）；ENSICAEN（法国国立卡昂高等工程师学院）；Normandie University（诺曼底大学）；University of Technology of Troyes（特鲁瓦技术大学）
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning (ML) technique that enables collaborative training in which devices perform learning using a local dataset while preserving their privacy. This technique ensures privacy, communication efficiency, and resource conservation. Despite these advantages, FL still suffers from several challenges related to reliability (i.e., unreliable participating devices in training), tractability (i.e., a large number of trained models), and anonymity. To address these issues, we propose a secure and trustworthy blockchain framework (SRB-FL) tailored to F…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；Vodafone（沃达丰）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；ConsenSys Health
Federated Learning harnesses data from multiple sources to build a single model. While the initial model might belong solely to the actor bringing it to the network for training, determining the ownership of the trained model resulting from Federated Learning remains an open question. In this paper we explore how Blockchains (in particular Ethereum) can be used to determine the evolving ownership of a model trained with Federated Learning. Firstly, we use the step-by-step evaluation metric to assess the relative contributivities of participants in a Federated Learning process. Next, we introdu…
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been a promising paradigm for communicating and edge processing of data on the move. We aim to employ Federated Learning (FL) and prominent features of blockchain into MEC architecture such as connected autonomous vehicles to enable complete decentralization, immutability, and rewarding mechanisms simultaneously. FL is advantageous for mobile devices with constrained connectivity since it requires model updates to be delivered to a central point instead of substantial amounts of data communication. For instance, FL in autonomous, connected vehicles can increase …
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院工业与系统工程学院）；TieSet Inc.（TieSet公司(或TieSet Inc.)）
A key aspect of Federated Learning (FL) is the requirement of a centralized aggregator to maintain and update the global model. However, in many cases orchestrating a centralized aggregator might be infeasible due to numerous operational constraints. In this paper, we introduce BAFFLE, an aggregator free, blockchain driven, FL environment that is inherently decentralized. BAFFLE leverages Smart Contracts (SC) to coordinate the round delineation, model aggregation and update tasks in FL. BAFFLE boosts computational performance by decomposing the global parameter space into distinct chunks follo…
TrustChain: A Blockchain Framework for Auditing and Verifying Aggregators in Decentralized Federated Learning
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Windsor（威省大学电气与计算机工程系）；Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick（新不伦瑞克大学计算机科学学院）
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Federated learning (FL) is a promising way to allow multiple data owners (clients) to collaboratively train machine learning models without compromising data privacy. Yet, existing FL solutions usually rely on a centralized aggregator for model weight aggregation, while assuming clients are honest. Even if data privacy can still be preserved, the problem of single-point failure and data poisoning attack from malicious clients remains unresolved. To tackle this challenge, we propose to use distributed ledger technology (DLT) to achieve FLock, a secure and reliable decentralized Federated Learni…
State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（网络与交换技术国家重点实验室，北京邮电大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；The Future Network of Intelligence Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳）未来智联网络研究院）；School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳）理工学院）
Quantum Cloud and Distributed Systems (qCLOUDS) Lab, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Australia（量子云与分布式系统实验室，计算机与信息系统学院，墨尔本大学，澳大利亚）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore University, India（计算机科学与工程系，维萨瓦拉亚工程学院，班加罗尔大学，印度）
Machine learning abilities have become a vital component for various solutions across industries, applications, and sectors. Many organizations seek to leverage AI-based solutions across their business services to unlock better efficiency and increase productivity. Problems, however, can arise if there is a lack of quality data for AI-model training, scalability, and maintenance. We propose a data-centric federated learning architecture leveraged by a public blockchain and smart contracts to overcome this significant issue. Our proposed solution provides a virtual public marketplace where deve…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering（Simula都市数字工程中心）
Emerging technologies such as digital twins and 6th Generation mobile networks (6G) have accelerated the realization of edge intelligence in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The integration of digital twin and 6G bridges the physical system with digital space and enables robust instant wireless connectivity. With increasing concerns on data privacy, federated learning has been regarded as a promising solution for deploying distributed data processing and learning in wireless networks. However, unreliable communication channels, limited resources, and lack of trust among users, hinder the …
University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
Federated learning (FL) is a promising distributed learning solution that only exchanges model parameters without revealing raw data. However, the centralized architecture of FL is vulnerable to the single point of failure. In addition, FL does not examine the legitimacy of local models, so even a small fraction of malicious devices can disrupt global training. To resolve these robustness issues of FL, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized FL framework, termed VBFL, by exploiting two mechanisms in a blockchained architecture. First, we introduced a novel decentralized vali…
Recently, blockchain-based federated learning (BFL) has attracted intensive research attention due to that the training process is auditable and the architecture is serverless avoiding the single point failure of the parameter server in vanilla federated learning (VFL). Nevertheless, BFL tremendously escalates the communication traffic volume because all local model updates (i.e., changes of model parameters) obtained by BFL clients will be transmitted to all miners for verification and to all clients for aggregation. In contrast, the parameter server and clients in VFL only retain aggregated …
China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东））；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
Medical diagnostic image analysis (e.g., CT scan or X-Ray) using machine learning is an efficient and accurate way to detect COVID-19 infections. However, sharing diagnostic images across medical institutions is usually not allowed due to the concern of patients' privacy. This causes the issue of insufficient datasets for training the image classification model. Federated learning is an emerging privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm that produces an unbiased global model based on the received updates of local models trained by clients without exchanging clients' local data. Nevertheless…
For the modern world where data is becoming one of the most valuable assets, robust data privacy policies rooted in the fundamental infrastructure of networks and applications are becoming an even bigger necessity to secure sensitive user data. In due course with the ever-evolving nature of newer statistical techniques infringing user privacy, machine learning models with algorithms built with respect for user privacy can offer a dynamically adaptive solution to preserve user privacy against the exponentially increasing multidimensional relationships that datasets create. Using these privacy a…
The continuous strengthening of the security posture of IoT ecosystems is vital due to the increasing number of interconnected devices and the volume of sensitive data shared. The utilisation of Machine Learning (ML) capabilities in the defence against IoT cyber attacks has many potential benefits. However, the currently proposed frameworks do not consider data privacy, secure architectures, and/or scalable deployments of IoT ecosystems. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical blockchain-based federated learning framework to enable secure and privacy-preserved collaborative IoT intrusion dete…
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis（印第安纳大学-普渡大学印第安纳波利斯分校）；Bowling Green State University（鲍灵格林州立大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）
Blockchain-based federated learning (BCFL) has recently gained tremendous attention because of its advantages such as decentralization and privacy protection of raw data. However, there has been few research focusing on the allocation of resources for clients in BCFL. In the BCFL framework where the FL clients and the blockchain miners are the same devices, clients broadcast the trained model updates to the blockchain network and then perform mining to generate new blocks. Since each client has a limited amount of computing resources, the problem of allocating computing resources into training…
Generative AI like ChatGPT in Blockchain Federated Learning: use cases, opportunities and future
Southern Illinois University（南伊利诺伊大学）；University of Asia Pacific（亚太大学）；Green University of Bangladesh（孟加拉国绿色大学）；University of North Texas（北得克萨斯大学）；John Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学）
National College of Business Administration and Economics（国家工商经济学院）；Riphah International University（里法哈国际大学）；Skyline University College（天际线大学学院）；Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia（马来西亚国民大学）；Gachon University（加川大学）；Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava（布拉迪斯拉发斯洛伐克理工大学）；Obuda University（欧布达大学）；TU-Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）
In recent years, the global Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) industry has evolved at a tremendous speed. Security and privacy are key concerns on the IoMT, owing to the huge scale and deployment of IoMT networks. Machine learning (ML) and blockchain (BC) technologies have significantly enhanced the capabilities and facilities of healthcare 5.0, spawning a new area known as "Smart Healthcare." By identifying concerns early, a smart healthcare system can help avoid long-term damage. This will enhance the quality of life for patients while reducing their stress and healthcare costs. The IoMT ena…
