The development of machine learning models requires a large amount of
training data. Data marketplaces are essential for trading high-quality,
private-domain data not publicly available online. However, due to growing data
privacy concerns, direct data exchange is inappropriate. Federated Learning
(FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that exchanges data utilities
(in form of local models or gradients) among multiple parties without directly
sharing the raw data. However, several challenges exist when applying existing
FL architectures to construct a data marketplace: (i) In existing FL
architectures, Data Acquirers (DAs) cannot privately evaluate local models from
Data Providers (DPs) prior to trading; (ii) Model aggregation protocols in
existing FL designs struggle to exclude malicious DPs without "overfitting" to
the DA's (possibly biased) root dataset; (iii) Prior FL designs lack a proper
billing mechanism to enforce the DA to fairly allocate the reward according to
contributions made by different DPs. To address above challenges, we propose
martFL, the first federated learning architecture that is specifically designed
to enable a secure utility-driven data marketplace. At a high level, martFL is
powered by two innovative designs: (i) a quality-aware model aggregation
protocol that achieves robust local model aggregation even when the DA's root
dataset is biased; (ii) a verifiable data transaction protocol that enables the
DA to prove, both succinctly and in zero-knowledge, that it has faithfully
aggregates the local models submitted by different DPs according to the
committed aggregation weights, based on which the DPs can unambiguously claim
the corresponding reward. We implement a prototype of martFL and evaluate it
extensively over various tasks. The results show that martFL can improve the
model accuracy by up to 25% while saving up to 64% data acquisition cost.