Secure and Trusted Collaborative Learning Based on Blockchain for Artificial Intelligence of Things

Empowered by promising artificial intelligence, the traditional Internet of Things is evolving into the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), which is an important enabling technology for Industry 4.0. Collaborative learning is a key technology for AIoT to build machine learning (ML) models on distributed datasets. However, there are two critical concerns of collaborative learning for AIoT: privacy leakage of sensitive data and dishonest computation. Specifically, data contains sensitive information of users, which cannot be openly shared for model learning. Furthermore, to protect the privacy of data or other selfish purposes, participants of collaborative learning may behave dishonestly, submitting dummy data or incorrect model computation. Therefore, it is important to guarantee privacy preservation of data and honest computation on collaborative learning. Our work tackles the two concerns wherein a model demander can securely train ML models with sensitive data and can regulate the computation of participants. To this end, we propose a secure and trusted collaborative learning framework called TrusCL. The framework guarantees privacy preservation via a delicate combination of homomorphic encryption (HE) and differential privacy (DP), achieving the trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore, based on blockchain, in our design, the key steps of secure collaborative learning are recorded on blockchain so that malicious behaviors can be effectively tracked and choked in a timely manner to facilitate trusted computation. Experimental results validate the trade-off performance of Trus-CL between model training efficiency and trained model accuracy.

Introduction

Along with the booming development of fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, many intel-ligent manufacturers in Industry 4.0, equipped with advanced sensors, collect a large amount of Internet of Things (IoT) data and perform data analysis and modeling through AI technologies to improve market insight and customer service [1]. Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) on Industry 4.0 combines AI with IoT technology, which is bound to bring new insights for these manufac-turers to cope with the rapid transformation of data and to make smarter production decisions. Collaborative learning plays a vital role in AIoT, enabling a manufacturer (i.e., a model demander) to jointly build machine learning (ML) models on the data gathered from all stages of production and operation, with multiple Industrial IoT (IIoT) organizations (i.e., data owners). Compared to the other popular paradigm, federated learning (FL), for secure ML on distributed datasets, collab-orative learning generally emphasizes the privacy preservation of trained models against data owners, which is more suitable for the scenarios of AIoT on Industry 4.0 where the model demander is unwilling to share trained models with data owners. The model in FL is known by every data owner, which ignores the security requirement of model demanders [2].