FedSmarteum: Secure Federated Matrix Factorization Using Smart Contracts for Multi-Cloud Supply Chain

With increased awareness comes unprecedented expectations. We live in a digital, cloud era wherein the underlying information architectures are expected to be elastic, secure, resilient, and handle petabyte scaling. The expectation of epic proportions from the next generation of the data frameworks is to not only do all of the above but also build it on a foundation of trust and explainability across multi-organization business networks. From cloud providers to automobile industries or even vaccine manufacturers, components are often sourced by a complex, not full digitized thread of disjoint suppliers. Building Machine Learning and AI-based order fulfillment and predictive models, remediating issues, is a challenge for multi-organization supply chain automation. We posit that Federated Learning in conjunction with blockchain and smart contracts are technologies primed to tackle data privacy and centralization challenges. In this paper, motivated by challenges in the industry, we propose a decentralized distributed system in conjunction with a recommendation system model (Matrix Factorization) that is trained using Federated Learning on an Ethereum blockchain network. We leverage smart contracts that allow decentralized serverless aggregation to update local-ized items vectors. Furthermore, we utilize Homomorphic Encryption (HE) to allow sharing the encrypted gradients over the network while maintaining their privacy. Based on our results, we argue that training a model over a serverless Blockchain network using smart contracts will provide the same accuracy as in a centralized model while maintaining our serverless model privacy and reducing the overhead communication to a central server. Finally, we assert such a system that provides transparency, audit-ready and deep insights into supply chain operations for enterprise cloud customers resulting in cost savings and higher Quality of Service (QoS).