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Abstract
Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that
promises privacy by keeping the data on the device. However, gradient
reconstruction and membership-inference attacks show that model updates still
leak information. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) can address those privacy
concerns but it suffers from ciphertext expansion and requires prohibitive
overhead on resource-constrained devices. We propose the first Hybrid
Homomorphic Encryption (HHE) framework for FL that pairs the PASTA symmetric
cipher with the BFV FHE scheme. Clients encrypt local model updates with PASTA
and send both the lightweight ciphertexts and the PASTA key (itself
BFV-encrypted) to the server, which performs a homomorphic evaluation of the
decryption circuit of PASTA and aggregates the resulting BFV ciphertexts. A
prototype implementation, developed on top of the Flower FL framework, shows
that on independently and identically distributed MNIST dataset with 12 clients
and 10 training rounds, the proposed HHE system achieves 97.6% accuracy, just
1.3% below plaintext, while reducing client upload bandwidth by over 2,000x and
cutting client runtime by 30% compared to a system based solely on the BFV FHE
scheme. However, server computational cost increases by roughly 15621x for each
client participating in the training phase, a challenge to be addressed in
future work.