TOP Literature Database Setup Once, Secure Always: A Single-Setup Secure Federated Learning Aggregation Protocol with Forward and Backward Secrecy for Dynamic Users
arxiv
Setup Once, Secure Always: A Single-Setup Secure Federated Learning Aggregation Protocol with Forward and Backward Secrecy for Dynamic Users
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Abstract
Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple users to collaboratively train a
machine learning model without sharing raw data, making it suitable for
privacy-sensitive applications. However, local model or weight updates can
still leak sensitive information. Secure aggregation protocols mitigate this
risk by ensuring that only the aggregated updates are revealed. Among these,
single-setup protocols, where key generation and exchange occur only once, are
the most efficient due to reduced communication and computation overhead.
However, existing single-setup protocols often lack support for dynamic user
participation and do not provide strong privacy guarantees such as forward and
backward secrecy. In this paper, we propose a new secure aggregation protocol
that requires only one setup operation for the entire FL training and allows
new users to join or leave at any round. It employs lightweight symmetric
homomorphic encryption with a key negation technique to efficiently mask
updates, without user-to-user communication -- unlike the existing protocols.
To defend against model inconsistency attacks, we introduce a simple
verification mechanism using message authentication codes (MACs). Our protocol
is the first to combine forward/backward secrecy, dropout resilience, and model
integrity verification in a single-setup design. We provide formal security
proofs and implement an end-to-end prototype, which source code has been
released. Our experimental results show that our protocol reduces user-side
computation by approximately 99% compared to state-of-the-art protocols like
e-SeaFL (ACSAC'24), making it highly practical for real-world FL deployments,
especially on resource-constrained devices.