A group key exchange and secure data sharing based on privacy protection for federated learning in edge-cloud collaborative computing environment

Federated learning (FL) is widely used in internet of things (IoT) scenarios such as health research, automotive autopilot, and smart home systems. In the process of model training of FL, each round of model training requires rigorous decryption training and encryption uploading steps. The efficiency of FL is seriously affected by frequent encryption and decryption operations. A scheme of key computation and key management with high efficiency is urgently needed. Therefore, we propose a group key agreement technique to keep private information and confidential data from being leaked, which is used to encrypt and decrypt the transmitted data among IoT terminals. The key agreement scheme includes hidden attribute authentication, multipolicy access, and ciphertext storage. Key agreement is designed with edge-cloud collaborative network architecture. Firstly, the terminal generates its own public and private keys through the key algorithm then confirms the authenticity and mapping relationship of its private and public keys to the cloud server. Secondly, IoT terminals can confirm their cryptographic attributes to the cloud and obtain the permissions corresponding to each attribute by encrypting the attributes. The terminal uses these permissions to encrypt the FL model parameters and uploads the secret parameters to the edge server. Through the storage of the edge server, these ciphertext decryption parameters are shared with the other terminal models of FL. Finally, other terminal models are trained by downloading and decrypting the shared model parameters for the purpose of FL. The performance analysis shows that this model has a better performance in computational complexity and computational time compared with the cited literature.

Automated summary

Federated learning is widely used in IoT scenarios, but frequent encryption and decryption operations seriously affect its efficiency. This article proposes a group key agreement technique to encrypt and decrypt data transmitted among IoT terminals, keeping private information and confidential data from being leaked. The key agreement scheme includes hidden attribute authentication, multipolicy access, and ciphertext storage, designed with an edge-cloud collaborative network architecture. The performance analysis shows that this model has better performance compared with existing literature in terms of computational complexity and time.