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Main Authors: Jiang, Zhifeng, Ye, Peng, He, Shiqi, Wang, Wei, Chen, Ruichuan, Li, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02880
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author Jiang, Zhifeng
Ye, Peng
He, Shiqi
Wang, Wei
Chen, Ruichuan
Li, Bo
author_facet Jiang, Zhifeng
Ye, Peng
He, Shiqi
Wang, Wei
Chen, Ruichuan
Li, Bo
contents In Federated Learning (FL), common privacy-enhancing techniques, such as secure aggregation and distributed differential privacy, rely on the critical assumption of an honest majority among participants to withstand various attacks. In practice, however, servers are not always trusted, and an adversarial server can strategically select compromised clients to create a dishonest majority, thereby undermining the system's security guarantees. In this paper, we present Lotto, an FL system that addresses this fundamental, yet underexplored issue by providing secure participant selection against an adversarial server. Lotto supports two selection algorithms: random and informed. To ensure random selection without a trusted server, Lotto enables each client to autonomously determine their participation using verifiable randomness. For informed selection, which is more vulnerable to manipulation, Lotto approximates the algorithm by employing random selection within a refined client pool. Our theoretical analysis shows that Lotto effectively aligns the proportion of server-selected compromised participants with the base rate of dishonest clients in the population. Large-scale experiments further reveal that Lotto achieves time-to-accuracy performance comparable to that of insecure selection methods, indicating a low computational overhead for secure selection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_02880
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lotto: Secure Participant Selection against Adversarial Servers in Federated Learning
Jiang, Zhifeng
Ye, Peng
He, Shiqi
Wang, Wei
Chen, Ruichuan
Li, Bo
Cryptography and Security
In Federated Learning (FL), common privacy-enhancing techniques, such as secure aggregation and distributed differential privacy, rely on the critical assumption of an honest majority among participants to withstand various attacks. In practice, however, servers are not always trusted, and an adversarial server can strategically select compromised clients to create a dishonest majority, thereby undermining the system's security guarantees. In this paper, we present Lotto, an FL system that addresses this fundamental, yet underexplored issue by providing secure participant selection against an adversarial server. Lotto supports two selection algorithms: random and informed. To ensure random selection without a trusted server, Lotto enables each client to autonomously determine their participation using verifiable randomness. For informed selection, which is more vulnerable to manipulation, Lotto approximates the algorithm by employing random selection within a refined client pool. Our theoretical analysis shows that Lotto effectively aligns the proportion of server-selected compromised participants with the base rate of dishonest clients in the population. Large-scale experiments further reveal that Lotto achieves time-to-accuracy performance comparable to that of insecure selection methods, indicating a low computational overhead for secure selection.
title Lotto: Secure Participant Selection against Adversarial Servers in Federated Learning
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02880