Ensuring resilience to Byzantine clients while maintaining the privacy of the
clients' data is a fundamental challenge in federated learning (FL). When the
clients' data is homogeneous, suitable countermeasures were studied from an
information-theoretic perspective utilizing secure aggregation techniques while
ensuring robust aggregation of the clients' gradients. However, the
countermeasures used fail when the clients' data is heterogeneous. Suitable
pre-processing techniques, such as nearest neighbor mixing, were recently shown
to enhance the performance of those countermeasures in the heterogeneous
setting. Nevertheless, those pre-processing techniques cannot be applied with
the introduced privacy-preserving mechanisms.
We propose a multi-stage method encompassing a careful co-design of
verifiable secret sharing, secure aggregation, and a tailored symmetric private
information retrieval scheme to achieve information-theoretic privacy
guarantees and Byzantine resilience under data heterogeneity. We evaluate the
effectiveness of our scheme on a variety of attacks and show how it outperforms
the previously known techniques. Since the communication overhead of secure
aggregation is non-negligible, we investigate the interplay with zero-order
estimation methods that reduce the communication cost in state-of-the-art FL
tasks and thereby make private aggregation scalable.