A learning federation is composed of multiple participants who use the
federated learning technique to collaboratively train a machine learning model
without directly revealing the local data. Nevertheless, the existing federated
learning frameworks have a serious defect that even a participant is revoked,
its data are still remembered by the trained model. In a company-level
cooperation, allowing the remaining companies to use a trained model that
contains the memories from a revoked company is obviously unacceptable, because
it can lead to a big conflict of interest. Therefore, we emphatically discuss
the participant revocation problem of federated learning and design a revocable
federated random forest (RF) framework, RevFRF, to further illustrate the
concept of revocable federated learning. In RevFRF, we first define the
security problems to be resolved by a revocable federated RF. Then, a suite of
homomorphic encryption based secure protocols are designed for federated RF
construction, prediction and revocation. Through theoretical analysis and
experiments, we show that the protocols can securely and efficiently implement
collaborative training of an RF and ensure that the memories of a revoked
participant in the trained RF are securely removed.