Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as a core technology to provide learning models to perform complex tasks. Boosted by Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS), the number of applications relying on ML capabilities is ever increasing. However, ML models are the source of different privacy violations through passive or active attacks from different entities. In this paper, we present MixNN a proxy-based privacy-preserving system for federated learning to protect the privacy of participants against a curious or malicious aggregation server trying to infer sensitive attributes. MixNN receives the model updates from participants and mixes layers between participants before sending the mixed updates to the aggregation server. This mixing strategy drastically reduces privacy without any trade-off with utility. Indeed, mixing the updates of the model has no impact on the result of the aggregation of the updates computed by the server. We experimentally evaluate MixNN and design a new attribute inference attack, Sim, exploiting the privacy vulnerability of SGD algorithm to quantify privacy leakage in different settings (i.e., the aggregation server can conduct a passive or an active attack). We show that MixNN significantly limits the attribute inference compared to a baseline using noisy gradient (well known to damage the utility) while keeping the same level of utility as classic federated learning.
Federated learning (FL) aims to collaboratively train the global model in a distributed manner by sharing the model parameters from local clients to a central server, thereby potentially protecting users' private information. Nevertheless, recent studies have illustrated that FL still suffers from information leakage as adversaries try to recover the training data by analyzing shared parameters from local clients. To deal with this issue, differential privacy (DP) is adopted to add noise to the gradients of local models before aggregation. It, however, results in the poor performance of gradie…
Vertical federated learning (vFL) has gained much attention and been deployed to solve machine learning problems with data privacy concerns in recent years. However, some recent work demonstrated that vFL is vulnerable to privacy leakage even though only the forward intermediate embedding (rather than raw features) and backpropagated gradients (rather than raw labels) are communicated between the involved participants. As the raw labels often contain highly sensitive information, some recent work has been proposed to prevent the label leakage from the backpropagated gradients effectively in vF…
Federated Learning for Cross-Domain Data Privacy: A Distributed Approach to Secure Collaboration
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工大学）
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The University of Western Australia（西澳大利亚大学）
Federated learning has been a hot research topic in enabling the collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations under the privacy restrictions. As researchers try to support more machine learning models with different privacy-preserving approaches, there is a requirement in developing systems and infrastructures to ease the development of various federated learning algorithms. Similar to deep learning systems such as PyTorch and TensorFlow that boost the development of deep learning, federated learning systems (FLSs) are equivalently important, and face challen…
Differentially Private Federated Learning: A Systematic Review
Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Institute of Science Tokyo（东京科学研究所）
Theoretically Principled Federated Learning for Balancing Privacy and Utility
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；WeBank（微众银行）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
ParaAegis: Parallel Protection for Flexible Privacy-preserved Federated Learning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China（计算机科学与工程学院，中山大学，广州，中国）；School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, China（软件工程学院，中山大学，珠海，中国）
School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学计算与信息系统学院）；College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fuzhou University（福州大学数学与计算机科学学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is an emerging sensing data collection pattern with scalability, low deployment cost, and distributed characteristics. Traditional MCS systems suffer from privacy concerns and fair reward distribution. Moreover, existing privacy-preserving MCS solutions usually focus on the privacy protection of data collection rather than that of data processing. To tackle faced problems of MCS, in this paper, we integrate federated learning (FL) into MCS and propose a privacy-preserving MCS system, called \textsc{CrowdFL}. Specifically, in order to protect privacy, participants loca…
In this paper, we consider privacy aspects of wireless federated learning (FL) with Over-the-Air (OtA) transmission of gradient updates from multiple users/agents to an edge server. By exploiting the waveform superposition property of multiple access channels, OtA FL enables the users to transmit their updates simultaneously with linear processing techniques, which improves resource efficiency. However, this setting is vulnerable to privacy leakage since an adversary node can hear directly the uncoded message. Traditional perturbation-based methods provide privacy protection while sacrificing …
In large-scale statistical learning, data collection and model fitting are moving increasingly toward peripheral devices---phones, watches, fitness trackers---away from centralized data collection. Concomitant with this rise in decentralized data are increasing challenges of maintaining privacy while allowing enough information to fit accurate, useful statistical models. This motivates local notions of privacy---most significantly, local differential privacy, which provides strong protections against sensitive data disclosures---where data is obfuscated before a statistician or learner can eve…
With the increased attention and legislation for data-privacy, collaborative machine learning (ML) algorithms are being developed to ensure the protection of private data used for processing. Federated learning (FL) is the most popular of these methods, which provides privacy preservation by facilitating collaborative training of a shared model without the need to exchange any private data with a centralized server. Rather, an abstraction of the data in the form of a machine learning model update is sent. Recent studies showed that such model updates may still very well leak private informatio…
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is essential for understanding customer's power consumption patterns and may find wide applications like carbon emission reduction and energy conservation. The training of NILM models requires massive load data containing different types of appliances. However, inadequate load data and the risk of power consumer privacy breaches may be encountered by local data owners during the NILM model training. To prevent such potential risks, a novel NILM method named Fed-NILM which is based on Federated Learning (FL) is proposed in this paper. In Fed-NILM, local mode…
Peking University（北京大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；Fuzhou University（福州大学）；Jinan University（暨南大学）；Loughborough University（拉夫堡大学）
Federated learning (FL) allows multiple participants to collaboratively build deep learning (DL) models without directly sharing data. Consequently, the issue of copyright protection in FL becomes important since unreliable participants may gain access to the jointly trained model. Application of homomorphic encryption (HE) in secure FL framework prevents the central server from accessing plaintext models. Thus, it is no longer feasible to embed the watermark at the central server using existing watermarking schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel client-side FL watermarking scheme to tackl…
North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Federated learning has been proposed as a privacy-preserving machine learning framework that enables multiple clients to collaborate without sharing raw data. However, client privacy protection is not guaranteed by design in this framework. Prior work has shown that the gradient sharing strategies in federated learning can be vulnerable to data reconstruction attacks. In practice, though, clients may not transmit raw gradients considering the high communication cost or due to privacy enhancement requirements. Empirical studies have demonstrated that gradient obfuscation, including intentional …
Recent research in Internet of things has been widely applied for industrial practices, fostering the exponential growth of data and connected devices. Henceforth, data-driven AI models would be accessed by different parties through certain data-sharing policies. However, most of the current training procedures rely on the centralized data-collection strategy and a single computational server. However, such a centralized scheme may lead to many issues. Customer data stored in a centralized database may be tampered with so the provenance and authenticity of data cannot be justified. Once the af…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Hainan University（海南大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Federated learning plays an important role in the process of smart cities. With the development of big data and artificial intelligence, there is a problem of data privacy protection in this process. Federated learning is capable of solving this problem. This paper starts with the current developments of federated learning and its applications in various fields. We conduct a comprehensive investigation. This paper summarize the latest research on the application of federated learning in various fields of smart cities. In-depth understanding of the current development of federated learning from…
A New Perspective on Privacy Protection in Federated Learning with Granular-Ball Computing
Southwestern University of Finance and Economics（西南财经大学）；Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）
Federated learning is a distributed machine learning method that aims to preserve the privacy of sample features and labels. In a federated learning system, ID-based sample alignment approaches are usually applied with few efforts made on the protection of ID privacy. In real-life applications, however, the confidentiality of sample IDs, which are the strongest row identifiers, is also drawing much attention from many participants. To relax their privacy concerns about ID privacy, this paper formally proposes the notion of asymmetrical vertical federated learning and illustrates the way to pro…
Australian Department of Health（澳大利亚卫生部）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Privacy protection is an ethical issue with broad concern in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Federated learning is a new machine learning paradigm to learn a shared model across users or organisations without direct access to the data. It has great potential to be the next-general AI model training framework that offers privacy protection and therefore has broad implications for the future of digital health and healthcare informatics. Implementing an open innovation framework in the healthcare industry, namely open health, is to enhance innovation and creative capability of health-related organi…
Systems Research Institute Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院系统研究所）；Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；TwoTronic Gmbh（TwoTronic有限公司）；Prodevelop（Prodevelop公司）
Federated learning (FL) was proposed to facilitate the training of models in a distributed environment. It supports the protection of (local) data privacy and uses local resources for model training. Until now, the majority of research has been devoted to "core issues", such as adaptation of machine learning algorithms to FL, data privacy protection, or dealing with the effects of uneven data distribution between clients. This contribution is anchored in a practical use case, where FL is to be actually deployed within an Internet of Things ecosystem. Hence, somewhat different issues that need …
Free Privacy Protection for Wireless Federated Learning: Enjoy It or Suffer from It?
School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（信息与通信工程学院，北京邮电大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
Andalusian Research Institute in Data Science and Computational Intelligence, University of Granada（格拉纳达大学安达卢西亚数据科学与计算智能研究所）
The high demand of artificial intelligence services at the edges that also preserve data privacy has pushed the research on novel machine learning paradigms that fit those requirements. Federated learning has the ambition to protect data privacy through distributed learning methods that keep the data in their data silos. Likewise, differential privacy attains to improve the protection of data privacy by measuring the privacy loss in the communication among the elements of federated learning. The prospective matching of federated learning and differential privacy to the challenges of data priva…
Privacy-preserving Continual Federated Clustering via Adaptive Resonance Theory
Osaka Metropolitan University（大阪公立大学）；Okayama University（冈山大学）；Universiti Malaya（马来亚大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）
Towards Explainable Federated Learning: Understanding the Impact of Differential Privacy
1 Institute of Exact；Natural Sciences, Federal University of Par\'a, Brazil；Resource Optimization in Networks -- PROTON Lab School of Electrical, Computer；Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA；3 Faculty of Mathematics \& Science, Brock University, Canada
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
As an emerging technique, Federated Learning (FL) can jointly train a global model with the data remaining locally, which effectively solves the problem of data privacy protection through the encryption mechanism. The clients train their local model, and the server aggregates models until convergence. In this process, the server uses an incentive mechanism to encourage clients to contribute high-quality and large-volume data to improve the global model. Although some works have applied FL to the Internet of Things (IoT), medicine, manufacturing, etc., the application of FL is still in its infa…
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning approach where a set of end-user devices participate in the learning process by acting on their isolated local data sets. Here, we process local data sets of users where worst-case optimization theory is used to reformulate the FL problem where the impact of local data sets in training phase is considered as an uncertain function bounded in a closed uncertainty region. This representation allows us to compare the performance of FL with its centralized counterpart, and to replace the uncertain function with a concept of protection functions lead…
A successful machine learning (ML) algorithm often relies on a large amount of high-quality data to train well-performed models. Supervised learning approaches, such as deep learning techniques, generate high-quality ML functions for real-life applications, however with large costs and human efforts to label training data. Recent advancements in federated learning (FL) allow multiple data owners or organisations to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing raw data. In this light, vertical FL allows organisations to build a global model when the participating organisations…
Refiner: Data Refining against Gradient Leakage Attacks in Federated Learning
East China Normal University（东华师范大学）；The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University（浙江大学区块链与数据安全国家重点实验室）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
With the development of information science and technology, various industries have generated massive amounts of data, and machine learning is widely used in the analysis of big data. However, if the privacy of machine learning applications' customers cannot be guaranteed, it will cause security threats and losses to users' personal privacy information and service providers. Therefore, the issue of privacy protection of machine learning has received wide attention. For centralized machine learning models, we evaluate the impact of different neural network layers, gradient, gradient norm, and f…
SAFE: Secure and Accurate Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Brain-Computer Interfaces
Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（教育部图像处理与智能控制重点实验室，人工智能与自动化学院，华中科技大学）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）
