Paper
Repurposing Backdoors for Good: Ephemeral Intrinsic Proofs for Verifiable Aggregation in Cross-silo Federated Learning
Authors
Xian Qin, Xue Yang, Xiaohu Tang
Abstract
While Secure Aggregation (SA) protects update confidentiality in Cross-silo Federated Learning, it fails to guarantee aggregation integrity, allowing malicious servers to silently omit or tamper with updates. Existing verifiable aggregation schemes rely on heavyweight cryptography (e.g., ZKPs, HE), incurring computational costs that scale poorly with model size. In this paper, we propose a lightweight architecture that shifts from extrinsic cryptographic proofs to \textit{Intrinsic Proofs}. We repurpose backdoor injection to embed verification signals directly into model parameters. By harnessing Catastrophic Forgetting, these signals are robust for immediate verification yet ephemeral, naturally decaying to preserve final model utility. We design a randomized, single-verifier auditing framework compatible with SA, ensuring client anonymity and preventing signal collision without trusted third parties. Experiments on SVHN, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 demonstrate high detection probabilities against malicious servers. Notably, our approach achieves over $1000\times$ speedup on ResNet-18 compared to cryptographic baselines, effectively scaling to large models.
Metadata
Related papers
Fractal universe and quantum gravity made simple
Fabio Briscese, Gianluca Calcagni • 2026-03-25
POLY-SIM: Polyglot Speaker Identification with Missing Modality Grand Challenge 2026 Evaluation Plan
Marta Moscati, Muhammad Saad Saeed, Marina Zanoni, Mubashir Noman, Rohan Kuma... • 2026-03-25
LensWalk: Agentic Video Understanding by Planning How You See in Videos
Keliang Li, Yansong Li, Hongze Shen, Mengdi Liu, Hong Chang, Shiguang Shan • 2026-03-25
Orientation Reconstruction of Proteins using Coulomb Explosions
Tomas André, Alfredo Bellisario, Nicusor Timneanu, Carl Caleman • 2026-03-25
The role of spatial context and multitask learning in the detection of organic and conventional farming systems based on Sentinel-2 time series
Jan Hemmerling, Marcel Schwieder, Philippe Rufin, Leon-Friedrich Thomas, Mire... • 2026-03-25
Raw Data (Debug)
{
"raw_xml": "<entry>\n <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10692v1</id>\n <title>Repurposing Backdoors for Good: Ephemeral Intrinsic Proofs for Verifiable Aggregation in Cross-silo Federated Learning</title>\n <updated>2026-03-11T12:04:18Z</updated>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10692v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.10692v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n <summary>While Secure Aggregation (SA) protects update confidentiality in Cross-silo Federated Learning, it fails to guarantee aggregation integrity, allowing malicious servers to silently omit or tamper with updates. Existing verifiable aggregation schemes rely on heavyweight cryptography (e.g., ZKPs, HE), incurring computational costs that scale poorly with model size. In this paper, we propose a lightweight architecture that shifts from extrinsic cryptographic proofs to \\textit{Intrinsic Proofs}. We repurpose backdoor injection to embed verification signals directly into model parameters. By harnessing Catastrophic Forgetting, these signals are robust for immediate verification yet ephemeral, naturally decaying to preserve final model utility. We design a randomized, single-verifier auditing framework compatible with SA, ensuring client anonymity and preventing signal collision without trusted third parties. Experiments on SVHN, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 demonstrate high detection probabilities against malicious servers. Notably, our approach achieves over $1000\\times$ speedup on ResNet-18 compared to cryptographic baselines, effectively scaling to large models.</summary>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.CR'/>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.AI'/>\n <published>2026-03-11T12:04:18Z</published>\n <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.CR'/>\n <author>\n <name>Xian Qin</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Xue Yang</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Xiaohu Tang</name>\n </author>\n </entry>"
}