PHY-Fed: An Information-Theoretic Secure Aggregation in Federated Learning in Wireless Communications

Federated learning (FL) is a type of distributed machine learning at the wireless edge that preserves the privacy of clients’ data from adversaries and even the central server. Existing federated learning approaches either use (i) secure multiparty computation (SMC) which is vulnerable to inference or (ii) differential privacy which may decrease the test accuracy given a large number of parties with relatively small amounts of data each. To tackle the problem with the existing methods in the literature, In this paper, we introduce PHY-Fed, a new framework that secures federated algorithms from an information-theoretic point of view.