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On Model Protection in Federated Learning against Eavesdropping Attacks

Published: April 2, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2504.02114v1

By: Dipankar Maity, Kushal Chakrabarti

Potential Business Impact:

Keeps secret computer learning from being spied on.

Business Areas:
Fraud Detection Financial Services, Payments, Privacy and Security

In this study, we investigate the protection offered by federated learning algorithms against eavesdropping adversaries. In our model, the adversary is capable of intercepting model updates transmitted from clients to the server, enabling it to create its own estimate of the model. Unlike previous research, which predominantly focuses on safeguarding client data, our work shifts attention protecting the client model itself. Through a theoretical analysis, we examine how various factors, such as the probability of client selection, the structure of local objective functions, global aggregation at the server, and the eavesdropper's capabilities, impact the overall level of protection. We further validate our findings through numerical experiments, assessing the protection by evaluating the model accuracy achieved by the adversary. Finally, we compare our results with methods based on differential privacy, underscoring their limitations in this specific context.

Page Count
10 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Cryptography and Security