BIT-FL: Blockchain-Enabled Incentivized and Secure Federated Learning Framework

Harnessing the benefits of blockchain, such as decentralization, immutability, and transparency, to bolster the credibility and security attributes of federated learning (FL) has garnered increasing attention. However, blockchain-enabled FL (BFL) still faces several challenges. The primary and most significant issue arises from its essential but slow validation procedure, which selects high-quality local models by recruiting distributed validators. The second issue stems from its incentive mechanism under the transparent nature of blockchain, increasing the risk of privacy breaches regarding workers’ cost information. The final challenge involves data eavesdropping from shared local models. To address these significant obstacles, this paper proposes a Blockchain-enabled Incentivized and Secure Federated Learning (BIT-FL) framework. BIT-FL leverages a novel loop-based sharded consensus algorithm to accelerate the validation procedure, ensuring the same security as non-sharded consensus protocols. It consistently outputs the correct local model selection when the fraction of adversaries among validators is less than <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1/2$</tex-math></inline-formula> with synchronous communication. Furthermore, BIT-FL integrates a randomized incentive procedure, attracting more participants while guaranteeing the privacy of their cost information through meticulous worker selection probability design. Finally, by adding artificial Gaussian noise to local models, it ensures the privacy of trainers’ local models. With the careful design of Gaussian noise, the excess empirical risk of BIT-FL is upper-bounded by <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {O}(\frac{\ln n_{\min}}{ n_{\min}^{3/2}}+\frac{\ln n}{n})$</tex-math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> represents the size of the union dataset, and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n_{{\min}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> represents the size of the smallest dataset. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that BIT-FL exhibits efficiency, robustness, and high accuracy for both classification and regression tasks.