Federated Learning With Blockchain-Enhanced Machine Unlearning: A Trustworthy Approach

With the growing need to comply with privacy regulations and respond to user data deletion requests, integrating machine unlearning into IoT-based federated learning has become imperative. This article introduces an innovative framework that melds blockchain with federated learning, ensuring an immutable record of unlearning requests and actions. Our approach not only bolsters the trustworthiness and integrity of the federated learning model but also adeptly addresses efficiency and security challenges typical in IoT environments. Key contributions include a certification mechanism for the unlearning process, enhancement of data security and privacy, and optimization of data management. Experimental results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving 0% accuracy for unlearned classes while maintaining 77.74% and 42.65% overall model accuracy for MNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively. Our time complexity analysis shows that the blockchain integration introduces only 2 seconds of overhead per epoch, highlighting the practicality of our solution for IoT applications.