Auditable Session Admission for Cross-Silo Federated Learning
Cryptography and Security
Summary
The authors address a problem in cross-silo federated learning where it's hard to control and track who can do what during a shared data session between organizations. They created a gateway that checks and enforces pre-approved permissions using special tokens for each session, making it easy to verify requests without keeping complicated records. This system also detects if someone tries to misuse or replay these tokens. They tested their method with a common dataset (MNIST) and made their solution open-source and easy to reproduce.
Authors
Enzo Fenoglio, Philip Treleaven
Abstract
Cross-silo federated learning keeps raw data local, but deployments frequently stall on a practical bottleneck when deciding who may invoke which session-scoped operations across organizational boundaries, under constraints that remain auditable after execution. In practice, admission is implemented via centralized policy services, platform configuration, or ad hoc checks, which drift over time and are hard to audit from boundary-visible evidence. We present a session admission gateway that enforces pre-approved session capabilities at the boundary and emits verifiable decision records. During session setup, participating organizations approve roles and constraints and mint signed session capability tokens that enumerate permitted session operations for a given session_id. At runtime, each request carries the token and a request-bound proof-of-possession, making replay and impersonation with stolen tokens detectable at the gateway via request binding. Admission reduces to stateless per-request cryptographic verification and capability matching at an admission gateway, while setup and orchestration remain out of scope and organization-specific. We validate the approach end-to-end on a cross-silo FL workflow using MNIST as a surrogate workload. The proof-of-concept is open-source, containerized, provisioned as code, and includes reproducible tests and evidence logs.