Distributed Fog Computing and Federated Learning enabled Secure Aggregation for IoT Devices

Authors: Yiran Liu, Ye Dong, Hao Wang, Han Jiang, Qiuliang Xu

Abstract: Federated learning (FL), as a prospective way to process and analyze the massive data from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, has attracted increasing attention from academia and industry. However, considering the unreliable nature of IoT devices, ensuring the efficiency of FL while protecting the privacy of devices’ input data is a challenging task. To address these issues, we propose a secure aggregation protocol based on efficient additive secret sharing in the fog-computing (FC) setting. As the secure aggregation is performed frequently in the training process of FL, the protocol should have low communication and computation overhead. First, we use a fog node (FN) as an intermediate processing unit to provide local services which can assist the cloud server aggregated the sum during the training process. Second, we design a light Request-then-Broadcast method to ensure our protocol has the robustness to dropped-out clients. Our protocol also provides two simple new client selection methods. The security and performance of our protocol are analyzed and compared with existed schemes. We conduct experiments on high-dimensional inputs, and our experimental results demonstrate about 24– 168× improvement in computation overhead and 87– 287× improvement in communication overhead compared to Google’s secure aggregation protocol (Bonwatiwz et al. CCS’17).