Distributed Federated Learning with Differential Privacy and Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising paradigm for training machine learning models on decentralized data sources without directly exchanging data. However, existing FL frameworks are susceptible to various vulnerabilities, including privacy breaches through information leakage and attacks from Byzantine clients attempting to compromise the learning process. This paper proposes a novel distributed FL framework that integrates differential privacy (DP) and Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) mechanisms to address these challenges comprehensively. Our approach employs advanced DP techniques to rigorously limit the information revealed by individual clients during model updates, while simultaneously utilizing BFT algorithms to detect and mitigate the influence of malicious or faulty clients. The resulting system demonstrates improved security, enhanced privacy guarantees, and robustness against adversarial attacks, making it a significant advancement in the field of secure and reliable distributed learning. The core of our work lies in the synergistic combination of these two crucial techniques, providing a layered defense against potential threats in FL environments. We detail the mathematical formulations underlying our approach and provide a theoretical analysis of its performance.