Multi-Level ACE-based IoT Knowledge Sharing for Personalized Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

The emerging federated learning (FL) enables distributed data mining for Internet of Things (IoT) big data while avoiding data outsourcing privacy risks via local data training and knowledge (i.e., model) sharing. However, only simplified local knowledge sharing will also cause user privacy leaks due to advanced attacks (e.g., model inversion or gradient leakage). Further, how to realize fine-grained and personalized privacy protection for IoT users is still a challenge. In this paper, we first propose a hierarchical cloud-edge orchestrated federated learning architecture for IoT, named HCE-FL, which aims to provide intelligent and distributed data analysis for IoT users. To address the FL privacy issues, we then design a multi-level access control encryption-based IoT knowledge sharing approach for HCE-FL. In our approach, IoT users could be classified into different levels according to their individual privacy requirements. In addition, the proposed multi-level access control encryption algorithm could ensure the confidentiality of the IoT knowledge flow, which runs through local clients, edge sanitizers, and cloud servers in HCE-FL. Moreover, security theoretical analysis shows that our HCE-FL could satisfy“no read” and no write” security rules for the mandatory IoT knowledge access control. Finally, we conduct experiments based on classic MNIST and CIFARIO datasets to evaluate our HCE-FL. The experimental results demonstrate that our solution can achieve personalized privacy-preserving FL without losing IoT data availability and users can obtain better model accuracy and convergence rate through secure IoT knowledge access and sharing.