Abstract
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)-aided federated learning protocols emerge as promising solutions to counter server-side adversaries and ensure the trustworthiness of the server. In this paper, we dissect existing protocols and demonstrate that server-side adversaries can still manipulate client selection and replay aggregation to compromise system robustness and privacy, by exploiting TEE limitations, i.e., state rollback and I/O manipulation. To this end, we present DIS-TFL, a distributed system of servers guarded by multiple TEEs forming an append-only ledger for privacy-preserved, robust FL aggregation. Specifically, DisT-FL ensures operation linearizability to thwart state rollback attacks and incorporates inputs from reliable servers to mitigate I/O manipulation threats. We implement DisT-FL and conduct evaluations in WAN settings. Experimental results demonstrate that DisT-FL can effectively counter the proposed attacks and match the single-TEE’s performance while offering a 6x throughput boost over its counterparts, leveraging TEE’s computational advantages.
