Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training of medical AI models across hospitals without centralizing patient data. However, the exchange of model updates exposes critical vulnerabilities: gradient inversion attacks can reconstruct patient information, Byzantine clients can poison the global model, and the \emph{Harvest Now, Decrypt Later} (HNDL) threat renders today's encrypted traffic vulnerable to future quantum adversaries.We introduce \textbf{ZKFL-PQ} (\emph{Zero-Knowledge Federated Learning, Post-Quantum}), a three-tiered cryptographic protocol that hybridizes (i) ML-KEM (FIPS~203) for quantum-resistant key encapsulation, (ii) lattice-based Zero-Knowledge Proofs for verifiable \emph{norm-constrained} gradient integrity, and (iii) BFV homomorphic encryption for privacy-preserving aggregation. We formalize the security model and prove correctness and zero-knowledge properties under the Module-LWE, Ring-LWE, and SIS assumptions \emph{in the classical random oracle model}. We evaluate ZKFL-PQ on synthetic medical imaging data across 5 federated clients over 10 training rounds. Our protocol achieves \textbf{100\% rejection of norm-violating updates} while maintaining model accuracy at 100\%, compared to a catastrophic drop to 23\% under standard FL. The computational overhead (factor $\sim$20$\times$) is analyzed and shown to be compatible with clinical research workflows operating on daily or weekly training cycles. We emphasize that the current defense guarantees rejection of large-norm malicious updates; robustness against subtle low-norm or directional poisoning remains future work.
Although homomorphic encryption can be incorporated into neural network layers for securing machine learning tasks, such as confidential inference over encrypted data samples and encrypted local models in federated learning, the computational overhead has been an Achilles heel. This paper proposes a caching protocol, namely CHEM, such that tensor ciphertexts can be constructed from a pool of cached radixes rather than carrying out expensive encryption operations. From a theoretical perspective, we demonstrate that CHEM is semantically secure and can be parameterized with straightforward analys…
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University（安全科学与工程学院，东南大学）；School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University（计算与通信学院，兰卡斯特大学）
Resilient Federated Chain: Transforming Blockchain Consensus into an Active Defense Layer for Federated Learning
Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence（计算机科学与人工智能系）；Andalusian Research Institute in Data Science and Computational Intelligence (DaSCI)（数据科学与计算智能安达卢西亚研究 institute）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）
More and more orgainizations and institutions make efforts on using external data to improve the performance of AI services. To address the data privacy and security concerns, federated learning has attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry to securely construct AI models across multiple isolated data providers. In this paper, we studied the efficiency problem of adapting widely used XGBoost model in real-world applications to vertical federated learning setting. State-of-the-art vertical federated XGBoost frameworks requires large number of encryption operations and ciphe…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Clustar（星辰天合）；Peng Cheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
With the increasing awareness of privacy protection and data fragmentation problem, federated learning has been emerging as a new paradigm of machine learning. Federated learning tends to utilize various privacy preserving mechanisms to protect the transferred intermediate data, among which homomorphic encryption strikes a balance between security and ease of utilization. However, the complicated operations and large operands impose significant overhead on federated learning. Maintaining accuracy and security more efficiently has been a key problem of federated learning. In this work, we inves…
Homomorphic encryption is a very useful gradient protection technique used in privacy preserving federated learning. However, existing encrypted federated learning systems need a trusted third party to generate and distribute key pairs to connected participants, making them unsuited for federated learning and vulnerable to security risks. Moreover, encrypting all model parameters is computationally intensive, especially for large machine learning models such as deep neural networks. In order to mitigate these issues, we develop a practical, computationally efficient encryption based protocol f…
A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is a deep-learning generative model in the field of Machine Learning (ML) that involves training two Neural Networks (NN) using a sizable data set. In certain fields, such as medicine, the training data may be hospital patient records that are stored across different hospitals. The classic centralized approach would involve sending the data to a centralized server where the model would be trained. However, that would involve breaching the privacy and confidentiality of the patients and their data, which would be unacceptable. Therefore, Federated Learning…
Understanding the Resource Cost of Fully Homomorphic Encryption in Quantum Federated Learning
Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；Zurich University of Applied Sciences（苏黎世应用科学大学）；Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI) Dresden/Leipzig, Leipzig University（德累斯顿/莱比锡可扩展数据分析与人工智能中心 (ScaDS.AI), 莱比锡大学）
FL-DABE-BC: A Privacy-Enhanced, Decentralized Authentication, and Secure Communication for Federated Learning Framework with Decentralized Attribute-Based Encryption and Blockchain for IoT Scenarios
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）
Federated learning has recently emerged as a paradigm promising the benefits of harnessing rich data from diverse sources to train high quality models, with the salient features that training datasets never leave local devices. Only model updates are locally computed and shared for aggregation to produce a global model. While federated learning greatly alleviates the privacy concerns as opposed to learning with centralized data, sharing model updates still poses privacy risks. In this paper, we present a system design which offers efficient protection of individual model updates throughout the…
Cloud computing is an upcoming technology that has been designed for commercial needs. One of the major issues in cloud computing is the difficulty to manage federated identities and the trust between the user and the service providers. This paper focuses on how security can be provided between the user and the service provider and how the user information can be authenticated. For the purpose of providing privacy and authentication, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) based Single Sign-On is used. Security is provided by using Hash based Encryption algorithm (HBE). HBE algorithm works w…
University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）；Virginia Commonwealth University（弗吉尼亚联邦大学）；Old Dominion University（奥尔多明尼昂大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
Medical data is often highly sensitive in terms of data privacy and security concerns. Federated learning, one type of machine learning techniques, has been started to use for the improvement of the privacy and security of medical data. In the federated learning, the training data is distributed across multiple machines, and the learning process is performed in a collaborative manner. There are several privacy attacks on deep learning (DL) models to get the sensitive information by attackers. Therefore, the DL model itself should be protected from the adversarial attack, especially for applica…
A Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Method for Heterogeneous Clients
Department of Computer and Network Engineering, The University of Electro-Communications（电子通信大学计算机与网络工程系）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University（海南大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston（休斯顿大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Information and Computer Science, Keio University（Keio大学信息与计算机科学系）
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that allows clients to collaboratively train a model over their own local data. FL promises the privacy of clients and its security can be strengthened by cryptographic methods such as additively homomorphic encryption (HE). However, the efficiency of FL could seriously suffer from the statistical heterogeneity in both the data distribution discrepancy among clients and the global distribution skewness. We mathematically demonstrate the cause of performance degradation in FL and examine the performance of FL over various datase…
Homomorphic encryption (HE) is a promising privacy-preserving technique for cross-silo federated learning (FL), where organizations perform collaborative model training on decentralized data. Despite the strong privacy guarantee, general HE schemes result in significant computation and communication overhead. Prior works employ batch encryption to address this problem, but it is still suboptimal in mitigating communication overhead and is incompatible with sparsification techniques. In this paper, we propose FLASHE, an HE scheme tailored for cross-silo FL. To capture the minimum requirements o…
In recent years, privacy-preserving methods for deep learning have become an urgent problem. Accordingly, we propose the combined use of federated learning (FL) and encrypted images for privacy-preserving image classification under the use of the vision transformer (ViT). The proposed method allows us not only to train models over multiple participants without directly sharing their raw data but to also protect the privacy of test (query) images for the first time. In addition, it can also maintain the same accuracy as normally trained models. In an experiment, the proposed method was demonstr…
Secure linear aggregation is to linearly aggregate private inputs of different users with privacy protection. The server in a federated learning (FL) environment can fulfill any linear computation on private inputs of users through the secure linear aggregation. At present, based on pseudo-random number generator and one-time padding technique, one can efficiently compute the sum of user inputs in FL, but linear calculations of user inputs are not well supported. Based on decentralized threshold additive homomorphic encryption (DTAHE) schemes, this paper provides a secure linear aggregation pr…
Federated learning (FL) enables distributed computation of machine learning models over various disparate, remote data sources, without requiring to transfer any individual data to a centralized location. This results in an improved generalizability of models and efficient scaling of computation as more sources and larger datasets are added to the federation. Nevertheless, recent membership attacks show that private or sensitive personal data can sometimes be leaked or inferred when model parameters or summary statistics are shared with a central site, requiring improved security solutions. In…
QuanCrypt-FL: Quantized Homomorphic Encryption with Pruning for Secure Federated Learning
The Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学骑士基金会计算与信息科学学院）；Sustainability, Optimization, and Learning for InterDependent networks laboratory（相互依赖网络的可持续性、优化与学习实验室）
SecureDrive-FL: Joint Differential Privacy and Gradient-Aware Selective Homomorphic Encryption for Federated Driver Monitoring
Institute of Industrial Automation and Software Engineering, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学工业自动化与软件工程研究所）；Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)（埃因霍温理工大学）
Recent studies demonstrate that effective healthcare can benefit from using the human genomic information. For instance, analysis of tumor genomes has revealed 140 genes whose mutations contribute to cancer. As a result, many institutions are using statistical analysis of genomic data, which are mostly based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS). GWAS analyze genome sequence variations in order to identify genetic risk factors for diseases. These studies often require pooling data from different sources together in order to unravel statistical patterns or relationships between genetic vari…
