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Abstract
Blockchain-based Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging decentralized machine
learning paradigm that enables model training without relying on a central
server. Although some BFL frameworks are considered privacy-preserving, they
are still vulnerable to various attacks, including inference and model
poisoning. Additionally, most of these solutions employ strong trust
assumptions among all participating entities or introduce incentive mechanisms
to encourage collaboration, making them susceptible to multiple security flaws.
This work presents VerifBFL, a trustless, privacy-preserving, and verifiable
federated learning framework that integrates blockchain technology and
cryptographic protocols. By employing zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive
Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) and incrementally verifiable computation
(IVC), VerifBFL ensures the verifiability of both local training and
aggregation processes. The proofs of training and aggregation are verified
on-chain, guaranteeing the integrity and auditability of each participant's
contributions. To protect training data from inference attacks, VerifBFL
leverages differential privacy. Finally, to demonstrate the efficiency of the
proposed protocols, we built a proof of concept using emerging tools. The
results show that generating proofs for local training and aggregation in
VerifBFL takes less than 81s and 2s, respectively, while verifying them
on-chain takes less than 0.6s.