SMTFL: Secure Model Training to Untrusted Participants in Federated Learning

Federated learning is an essential distributed model training technique. However, threats such as gradient inversion attacks and poisoning attacks pose significant risks to the privacy of training data and the model correctness. We propose a novel approach called SMTFL to achieve secure model training in federated learning without relying on trusted participants. To safeguard gradients privacy against gradient inversion attacks, clients are dynamically grouped, allowing one client's gradient to be divided to obfuscate the gradients of other clients within the group. This method incorporates checks and balances to reduce the collusion for inferring specific client data. To detect poisoning attacks from malicious clients, we assess the impact of aggregated gradients on the global model's performance, enabling effective identification and exclusion of malicious clients. Each client's gradients are encrypted and stored, with decryption collectively managed by all clients. The detected poisoning gradients are invalidated from the global model through a unlearning method. We present a practical secure aggregation scheme, which does not require trusted participants, avoids the performance degradation associated with traditional noise-injection, and aviods complex cryptographic operations during gradient aggregation. Evaluation results are encouraging based on four datasets and two models: SMTFL is effective against poisoning attacks and gradient inversion attacks, achieving an accuracy rate of over 95% in locating malicious clients, while keeping the false positive rate for honest clients within 5%. The model accuracy is also nearly restored to its pre-attack state when SMTFL is deployed.

@article{zhao2025_2502.02038,
  title={ SMTFL: Secure Model Training to Untrusted Participants in Federated Learning },
  author={ Zhihui Zhao and Xiaorong Dong and Yimo Ren and Jianhua Wang and Dan Yu and Hongsong Zhu and Yongle Chen },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.02038},
  year={ 2025 }
}