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arXiv · 2407.07054

A Differentially Private Blockchain-Based Approach for Vertical Federated Learning

Linh Tran·Sanjay Chari·Md. Saikat Islam Khan·Aaron Zachariah·Stacy Patterson·Oshani Seneviratne
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Abstract

We present the Differentially Private Blockchain-Based Vertical Federal Learning (DP-BBVFL) algorithm that provides verifiability and privacy guarantees for decentralized applications. DP-BBVFL uses a smart contract to aggregate the feature representations, i.e., the embeddings, from clients transparently. We apply local differential privacy to provide privacy for embeddings stored on a blockchain, hence protecting the original data. We provide the first prototype application of differential privacy with blockchain for vertical federated learning. Our experiments with medical data show that DP-BBVFL achieves high accuracy with a tradeoff in training time due to on-chain aggregation. This innovative fusion of differential privacy and blockchain technology in DP-BBVFL could herald a new era of collaborative and trustworthy machine learning applications across several decentralized application domains.

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Linh Tran, Sanjay Chari, Md. Saikat Islam Khan, Aaron Zachariah, Stacy Patterson, Oshani Seneviratne. 2024-07-09. A Differentially Private Blockchain-Based Approach for Vertical Federated Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07054

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