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Confidential Federated Computations (arxiv.org)
1 point by tiziano88 on Apr 17, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It runs the server's private-data math inside sealed hardware chips and publishes the code, so outsiders can check that privacy rules are followed. Unlike the usual trick of splitting the work across many servers, this hides each person's update without huge extra noise or trusting the company.

Abstract

Federated Learning and Analytics (FLA) have seen widespread adoption by technology platforms for processing sensitive on-device data. However, basic FLA systems have privacy limitations: they do not necessarily require anonymization mechanisms like differential privacy (DP), and provide limited protections against a potentially malicious service provider. Adding DP to a basic FLA system currently requires either adding excessive noise to each device's updates, or assuming an honest service provider that correctly implements the mechanism and only uses the privatized outputs. Secure multiparty computation (SMPC) -based oblivious aggregations can limit the service provider's access to individual user updates and improve DP tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs are still suboptimal, and they suffer from scalability challenges and susceptibility to Sybil attacks. This paper introduces a novel system architecture that leverages trusted execution environments (TEEs) and open-sourcing to both ensure confidentiality of server-side computations and provide externally verifiable privacy properties, bolstering the robustness and trustworthiness of private federated computations.

Hubert Eichner, Daniel Ramage, Kallista Bonawitz, Dzmitry Huba, Tiziano Santoro, Brett McLarnon, Timon Van Overveldt, Nova Fallen, Peter Kairouz, Albert Cheu, Katharine Daly, Adria Gascon, et al.
arXiv:2404.10764 · cs.CR, cs.LG · submitted Apr 16, 2024 · updated Mar 3, 2025
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