Securing Private Federated Learning in a Malicious Setting: A Scalable TEE-Based Approach with Client Auditing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Takagi, Shun, Hasegawa, Satoshi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Takagi, Shun
Hasegawa, Satoshi
author_facet Takagi, Shun
Hasegawa, Satoshi
contents In cross-device private federated learning, differentially private follow-the-regularized-leader (DP-FTRL) has emerged as a promising privacy-preserving method. However, existing approaches assume a semi-honest server and have not addressed the challenge of securely removing this assumption. This is due to its statefulness, which becomes particularly problematic in practical settings where clients can drop out or be corrupted. While trusted execution environments (TEEs) might seem like an obvious solution, a straightforward implementation can introduce forking attacks or availability issues due to state management. To address this problem, our paper introduces a novel server extension that acts as a trusted computing base (TCB) to realize maliciously secure DP-FTRL. The TCB is implemented with an ephemeral TEE module on the server side to produce verifiable proofs of server actions. Some clients, upon being selected, participate in auditing these proofs with small additional communication and computational demands. This extension solution reduces the size of the TCB while maintaining the system's scalability and liveness. We provide formal proofs based on interactive differential privacy, demonstrating privacy guarantee in malicious settings. Finally, we experimentally show that our framework adds small constant overhead to clients in several realistic settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_08709
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Securing Private Federated Learning in a Malicious Setting: A Scalable TEE-Based Approach with Client Auditing
Takagi, Shun
Hasegawa, Satoshi
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
In cross-device private federated learning, differentially private follow-the-regularized-leader (DP-FTRL) has emerged as a promising privacy-preserving method. However, existing approaches assume a semi-honest server and have not addressed the challenge of securely removing this assumption. This is due to its statefulness, which becomes particularly problematic in practical settings where clients can drop out or be corrupted. While trusted execution environments (TEEs) might seem like an obvious solution, a straightforward implementation can introduce forking attacks or availability issues due to state management. To address this problem, our paper introduces a novel server extension that acts as a trusted computing base (TCB) to realize maliciously secure DP-FTRL. The TCB is implemented with an ephemeral TEE module on the server side to produce verifiable proofs of server actions. Some clients, upon being selected, participate in auditing these proofs with small additional communication and computational demands. This extension solution reduces the size of the TCB while maintaining the system's scalability and liveness. We provide formal proofs based on interactive differential privacy, demonstrating privacy guarantee in malicious settings. Finally, we experimentally show that our framework adds small constant overhead to clients in several realistic settings.
title Securing Private Federated Learning in a Malicious Setting: A Scalable TEE-Based Approach with Client Auditing
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08709