PIRATE: A Blockchain-Based Secure Framework of Distributed Machine Learning in 5G Networks

In fifth-generation (5G) networks and beyond, communication latency and network bandwidth will be no longer be bottlenecks to mobile users. Thus, almost every mobile device can participate in distributed learning. That is, the availability issue of distributed learning can be eliminated. However, model safety will become a challenge. This is because the distributed learning system is prone to suffering from byzantine attacks during the stages of updating model parameters and aggregating gradients among multiple learning participants. Therefore, to provide the byzantine-resilience for distributed learning in the 5G era, this article proposes a secure computing framework based on the sharding technique of blockchain, namely PiRATE. To prove the feasibility of the proposed PiRATE, we implemented a prototype. A case study shows how the proposed PiRATE contributes to distributed learning. Finally, we also envision some open issues and challenges based on the proposed byzantine- resilient learning framework.