Practical Secure Aggregation for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

TLDR

The paper proposes a novel, communication‑efficient, failure‑robust protocol for secure aggregation of high‑dimensional data. The protocol lets a server compute the sum of large, user‑held data vectors from mobile devices without learning individual contributions, is provably secure against honest‑but‑curious and active adversaries, and tolerates arbitrary user drop‑outs. Experiments show the protocol incurs only modest overhead, with 1.73× and 1.98× communication expansion for 210 and 214 users respectively, compared to sending data in the clear.

Abstract

We design a novel, communication-efficient, failure-robust protocol for secure aggregation of high-dimensional data. Our protocol allows a server to compute the sum of large, user-held data vectors from mobile devices in a secure manner (i.e. without learning each user's individual contribution), and can be used, for example, in a federated learning setting, to aggregate user-provided model updates for a deep neural network. We prove the security of our protocol in the honest-but-curious and active adversary settings, and show that security is maintained even if an arbitrarily chosen subset of users drop out at any time. We evaluate the efficiency of our protocol and show, by complexity analysis and a concrete implementation, that its runtime and communication overhead remain low even on large data sets and client pools. For 16-bit input values, our protocol offers $1.73 x communication expansion for 210 users and 220-dimensional vectors, and 1.98 x expansion for 214 users and 224-dimensional vectors over sending data in the clear.