EPFed: Achieving Optimal Balance between Privacy and Efficiency in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is increasingly challenged by security and privacy concerns, particularly vulnerabilities exposed by malicious participants. There remains a gap in effectively countering threats such as model inversion and poisoning attacks in existing research. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Effective Private-Protected Federated Learning Aggregation Algorithm (EPFed), a framework that utilizes a blockchain platform, homomorphic encryption, and secret sharing to fortify the data privacy and computational efficiency in a federated learning environment. EPFed works by establishing “trust groups” through the unique integration of a Chinese Remainder Theorem-based secret sharing scheme with Paillier homomorphic encryption, streamlining secure model parameter exchange and aggregation while minimizing the computational load. Our performance-driven aggregation strategy leverages local performance metrics to safeguard against malicious contributions, ensuring both the integrity and efficiency of the learning process. The evaluations demonstrate that EPFed achieves a remarkable accuracy rate of 92.5%, thereby confirming the advanced nature of the proposed solution in addressing the pressing challenges of FL.