International audience

International audience

Blockchain-based Federated Learning (BFL) is an emerging decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables model training without relying on a central server. Although some BFL frameworks are considered privacy-preserving, they are still vulnerable to various attacks, including inference and model poisoning. Additionally, most of these solutions employ strong trust assumptions among all participating entities or introduce incentive mechanisms to encourage collaboration, making them susceptible to multiple security flaws. This work presents VerifBFL, a trustless, privacy-preserving, and verifiable federated learning framework that integrates blockchain technology and cryptographic protocols. By employing zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) and in-crementally verifiable computation (IVC), VerifBFL ensures the verifiability of both local training and aggregation processes. The proofs of training accuracy and aggregation are verified on-chain, guaranteeing the integrity and auditability of each participant's contributions. To protect training data from inference attacks, VerifBFL leverages differential privacy. Finally, to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed protocols, we built a proof of concept using emerging tools. The results show that generating proofs for local training and aggregation in VerifBFL takes less than 81s and 2s, respectively, while verifying them on-chain takes less than 0.6s.

Blockchained federated learning (BFL) combines the concepts of federated learning and blockchain technology to enhance privacy, security, and transparency in collaborative machine learning models. However, implementing BFL frameworks poses challenges in terms of scalability and cost-effectiveness. Reputation-aware BFL poses even more challenges, as blockchain validators are tasked with processing federated learning transactions along with the transactions that evaluate FL tasks and aggregate reputations. This leads to faster blockchain congestion and performance degradation. To improve BFL efficiency while increasing scalability and reducing on-chain reputation management costs, this paper proposes AutoDFL, a scalable and automated reputation-aware decentralized federated learning framework. AutoDFL leverages zk-Rollups as a Layer-2 scaling solution to boost the performance while maintaining the same level of security as the underlying Layer-1 blockchain. Moreover, AutoDFL introduces an automated and fair reputation model designed to incentivize federated learning actors. We develop a proof of concept for our framework for an accurate evaluation. Tested with various custom workloads, AutoDFL reaches an average throughput of over 3000 TPS with a gas reduction of up to 20X.

Current blockchain-based reputation solutions for crowdsourcing fail to tackle the challenge of ensuring both efficiency and privacy without compromising the scalability of the block chain. Developing an effective, transparent, and privacy-preserving reputation model necessitates on-chain implementation using smart contracts. However, managing task evaluation and reputation updates alongside crowdsourcing transactions on-chain substantially strains system scalability and performance. This paper introduces RollupTheCrowd, a novel blockchain-powered crowdsourcing framework that leverages zkRollups to enhance system scalability while protecting user privacy. Our framework includes an effective and privacy-preserving reputation model that gauges workers' trustworthiness by assessing their crowdsourcing interactions. To alleviate the load on our blockchain, we employ an off-chain storage scheme, optimizing RollupTheCrowd's performance. Utilizing smart contracts and zero-knowledge proofs, our Rollup layer achieves a significant 20x reduction in gas consumption. To prove the feasibility of the proposed framework, we developed a proof-of-concept implementation using cutting-edge tools. The experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of RollupTheCrowd, validating its potential for real-world application scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have witnessed a rapid growth in emerging challenges and capabilities of language understanding, generation, and reasoning. Despite their remarkable performance in natural language processing-based applications, LLMs are susceptible to undesirable and erratic behaviors, including hallucinations, unreliable reasoning, and the generation of harmful content. These flawed behaviors under-mine trust in LLMs and pose significant hurdles to their adoption in real-world applications, such as legal assistance and medical diagnosis, where precision, reliability, and ethical considerations are paramount. These could also lead to user dissatisfaction, which is currently inadequately assessed and captured. Therefore, to effectively and transparently assess users' satisfaction and trust in their interactions with LLMs, we design and develop LLMChain, a decentralized blockchain-based reputation system that combines automatic evaluation with human feedback to assign contextual reputation scores that accurately reflect LLM's behavior. LLMChain helps users and entities identify the most trustworthy LLM for their specific needs and provides LLM developers with valuable information to refine and improve their models. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a blockchain-based distributed framework for sharing and evaluating LLMs has been introduced. Implemented using emerging tools, LLMChain is evaluated across two benchmark datasets, showcasing its effectiveness and scalability in assessing seven different LLMs.

International audience

As the adoption of digital technologies expands, it becomes vital to build trust and confidence in the integrity of such technology. The SPIRIT project investigates the proof of concept of employing novel secure and privacy-ensuring techniques in services set-up in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, aiming to increase the trust of users in IoTbased systems. The proposed system integrates three highly novel technology concepts developed by the consortium partners. Specifically, a technology, ermed ICMetrics, for deriving encryption keys directly from the operating characteristics of digital devices; secondly, a technology based on a contentbased signature of user data in order to ensure the integrity of sentdata upon arrival; a third technology, termed semantic firewall, which is able to allow or deny the transmission of data derived from an IoT device according to the information contained within the data and the information gathered about the requester.

We present our exploratory work for situation preselecting in interactive applications, assuming that the application is an Interactive Adaptive System based on a sequence of contextualized “situations”. Each situation confines activities and interactions related to a common context, resources and system actors. When one situation is completed, the system has to determine which is the best following one. We introduce in this paper a new preselecting method that identifies possible next situations among all available situations. We propose a strategy using Naïve Bayes based on the analysis of the sets of available traces (the past of users). Combining all obtained results, we get a set of situations, called set of alternatives that can be used in any decision algorithm. We demonstrate our approach on a case study based on Tamagotchi game.

Abstract This paper defines a multi‐level modeling approach for availability assessment of e‐business applications, based on two main steps: (1) hierarchical description of the system and its interactions with the users, from the functional and structural points of view, and (2) hierarchical construction and solution of the availability models based on information from the first step. Four modeling abstraction levels are considered. The highest level (user level) describes the availability of the e‐business application as perceived by the users. Intermediate levels describe the availability of functions and services provided to the users. The lowest level describes the availability of the component systems on which functions and services are implemented. The availability measures of a given level are computed based on the measures provided by the immediately lower level. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The aim of our work is to provide a modeling framework for evaluating performability measures of Multipurpose, Multiprocessor Systems (MMSs). The originality of our approach is in the explicit separation between the architectural and environmental concerns of a system. The overall dependability model, based on stochastic reward nets, is composed of 1) an architectural model describing the behavior of system hardware and software components, 2) a service-level model, and 3) a maintenance policy model. The two latter models are related to the system utilization environment. The results can be used for supporting the manufacturer design choices as well as the potential end-user configuration selection. We illustrate the approach on a particular family of MMSs under investigation by a system manufacturer for Internet and e-commerce applications. As the systems are scalable, we consider two architectures: a reference one composed of 16 processors and an extended one with 20 processors. Then, we use the obtained results to evaluate the performability of a clustered system composed of four reference systems. We evaluate comprehensive measures defined with respect to the end-user service requirements and specific measures in relation to the distributed shared memory paradigm.

This paper defines a multi-level modeling framework for E-business system availability evaluation. It is based on two main steps: (1) hierarchical description of the system and its interactions with the users, from the functional and structural points of view; and (2) hierarchical construction and solution of the system availability models based on information from the first step.