BFG: privacy protection framework for internet of medical things based on blockchain and federated learning

Abstract

The deep integration of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and Artificial intelligence makes the further development of intelligent medical services possible, but privacy leakage and data security problems hinder its wide application. Although the combination of IoMT and federated learning (FL) can achieve no direct access to the original data of participants, FL still can't resist inference attacks against model parameters and the single point of failure of the central server. In addition, malicious clients can disguise as benign participants to launch poisoning attacks, which seriously compromises the accuracy of the global model. In this paper, we design a new privacy protection framework (BFG) for decentralized FL using blockchain, differential privacy and Generative Adversarial Network. The framework can effectively avoid a single point of failure and resist inference attacks. In particular, it can limit the success rate of poisoning attacks to less than 26%. Moreover, the framework alleviates the storage pressure of the blockchain, achieves a balance between privacy budget and global model accuracy, and can effectively resist the negative impact of node withdrawal. Simulation experiments on image datasets show that the BFG framework has a better combined performance in terms of accuracy, robustness and privacy preservation.

KEYWORDS:

• Blockchain
• federated learning
• generative adversarial network
• internet of medical things
• privacy protection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scientific Research Foundation of Hunan Provincial Education Department (2019-291, 20A191), Hunan University of Science and Technology (EK2104).