A Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning Model for Privacy Preservation: System Design

Information Silo is a common problem in most industries, while Federated Learning (FL) as an emerging privacy-preservation technique aims to facilitate data sharing to solve the problem. It avoids data leakage by sharing the model gradient instead of the raw data. However, there are some challenges of FL, such as Single Point of Failure (SPoF), gradient privacy, and trust issues. This paper proposes a Homomorphic-integrated and blockchain-based FL model to address the above issues. It provides gradient privacy protection by employing Homomorphic, and uses a smart contract-based reputation scheme and an on/off-chain storage strategy to respectively solve FL trust and blockchain storage issues. In the end, it evaluates the proposed model by providing a qualitative privacy analysis and conducting preliminary experiments on model performance.