Decentralized privacy using blockchain-enabled federated learning in fog computing

As the extension of cloud computing and a foundation of IoT, fog computing is experiencing fast prosperity because of its potential to mitigate some troublesome issues, such as network congestion, latency, and local autonomy. However, privacy issues and the subsequent inefficiency are dragging down the performances of fog computing. The majority of existing works hardly consider a reasonable balance between them while suffering from poisoning attacks. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel blockchain-enabled federated learning (FL-Block) scheme to close the gap. FL-Block allows local learning updates of end devices exchanges with a blockchain-based global learning model, which is verified by miners. Built upon this, FL-Block enables the autonomous machine learning without any centralized authority to maintain the global model and coordinates by using a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism of the blockchain. Furthermore, we analyze the latency performance of FL-Block and further derive the optimal block generation rate by taking communication, consensus delays, and computation cost into consideration. Extensive evaluation results show the superior performances of FL-Block from the aspects of privacy protection, efficiency, and resistance to the poisoning attack.