DFL: High-Performance Blockchain-Based Federated Learning

Many researchers are trying to replace the aggregation server in federated learning with a blockchain system to achieve better privacy, robustness and scalability. In this case, clients will upload their updated models to the blockchain ledger, and use a smart contract on the blockchain system to perform model averaging. However, running machine learning applications on the blockchain is almost impossible because a blockchain system, which usually takes over half minute to generate a block, is extremely slow and unable to support machine learning applications. This paper proposes a completely new public blockchain architecture called DFL, which is specially optimized for distributed federated machine learning. This architecture inherits most traditional blockchain merits and achieves extremely high performance with low resource consumption by waiving global consensus. To characterize the performance and robustness of our architecture, we implement the architecture as a prototype and test it on a physical four-node network. To test more nodes and more complex situations, we build a simulator to simulate the network. The LeNet results indicate our system can reach over 90% accuracy for non-I.I.D. datasets even while facing model poisoning attacks, with the blockchain consuming less than 5% of hardware resources.