Sym-Fed: Unleashing the Power of Symmetric Encryption in Cross-Silo Federated Learning

With the increasing number of big data applications, large amounts of valuable data are distributed in different organizations or regions. Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing sensitive data and is widely used in AI medical diagnosis, economy, and autonomous driving scenarios. However, it still leaks the privacy from the gradient exchange in federated learning. What’s worse, state-of-the-art work, such as Batchcrypt, still suffers from computational overhead due to a considerable amount of computation and communication costs caused by homomorphic encryption. Therefore, we propose a novel symmetric key-based homomorphic encryption scheme, Sym-Fed. To unleash the power of symmetric encryption in federated learning, we combine random masking with symmetric encryption and keep the homomorphic property during the gradient exchange in the federated learning process. Finally, the security analysis and experimental results on real workloads show that our design achieves performance improvement 6× to 668× and reduces the communication overhead 1.2× to 107× compared with the state-of-the-art work, BatchCrypt and FATE, without model accuracy degradation and security compromise.