Federated Learning has rapidly expanded from its original inception to now have a large body of research, several frameworks, and sold in a variety of commercial offerings. Thus, its security and robustness is of significant importance. There are many algorithms that provide robustness in the case of malicious clients. However, the aggregator itself may behave maliciously, for example, by biasing the model or tampering with the weights to weaken the model’s privacy. In this work, we introduce a verifiable federated learning protocol that enables clients to verify the correctness of the aggregator’s computation without compromising the confidentiality of their updates. Our protocol uses a standard secure aggregation technique to protect individual model updates with a linearly homomorphic authenticator scheme that enables efficient, privacy-preserving verification of the aggregated result. Our construction ensures that clients can detect manipulation by the aggregator while maintaining low computational overhead. We demonstrate that our approach scales to large models, enabling verification over large neural networks with millions of parameters.

With the lowering costs of sensors, high-volume and high-velocity data are increasingly being generated and analyzed, especially in IoT domains like energy and smart homes. Consequently, applications that require accurate short-term forecasts and predictions are also steadily increasing. In this paper, we provide an overview of a novel end-to-end platform that provides efficient ingestion, compression, transfer, query processing, and machine learning-based analytics for high-frequency and high-volume time series from IoT. The performance of the platform is evaluated using real-world dataset from RES installations. The results show the importance of high-frequency analytics and the surprisingly positive impact of error bounded lossy compression on machine learning in the form of AutoML. For example, when detecting yaw misalignments in wind turbines, an improvement of 9% in accuracy was observed for AutoML models on lossy compressed data compared to the current industry standard of 10-minute aggregated data. Thus, these small-scale experiments show the potential of the platform, and larger pilots are planned.