Federated learning allows us to distributively train a machine learning model
where multiple parties share local model parameters without sharing private
data. However, parameter exchange may still leak information. Several
approaches have been proposed to overcome this, based on multi-party
computation, fully homomorphic encryption, etc.; many of these protocols are
slow and impractical for real-world use as they involve a large number of
cryptographic operations. In this paper, we propose the use of Trusted
Execution Environments (TEE), which provide a platform for isolated execution
of code and handling of data, for this purpose. We describe Flatee, an
efficient privacy-preserving federated learning framework across TEEs, which
considerably reduces training and communication time. Our framework can handle
malicious parties (we do not natively solve adversarial data poisoning, though
we describe a preliminary approach to handle this).