Privacy-Preserving Chunk Scheduling in a BitTorrent Implementation of Federated Learning




Li, Naicheng; Dogani, Javad; Wang, Rui; Liang, Kaitai; Laoutaris, Nikolaos

N/A

International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

2026

 International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

2026 IEEE 46th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)

46

730

740

979-8-3195-2980-0

979-8-3195-2979-4

1063-6927

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1109/2575-8411.2026.00075

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11619026



Decentralized mix-and-forward designs remove the server, but repeated local mixing can attenuate global information under heterogeneity and exposes peer-to-peer neighborhoods as a privacy attack surface. To preserve FedAvgstyle aggregation semantics (over updates reconstructable by the round deadline) while scaling dissemination, we present FLTorrent, a BitTorrent-based dissemination layer for serverless FL with a short warm-up. Warm-up hardens within-round source unlinkability—a dissemination-layer goal orthogonal to content protections (e.g., DP or secure aggregation)—via (i) pre-round obfuscation, (ii) randomized lags, and (iii) coordination-only non-owner-first scheduling (tracker off the data path), before switching to vanilla BitTorrent swarming. We upper-bound the per-transfer attribution posterior by the fraction of owner chunks in a sender's eligible cover set, and derive a tighter highprobability bound that improves with early non-owner mass. A simple heuristic, GreedyFastestFirst, attains ≈92% of a bandwidth-optimal max-flow upper bound, while warm-up remains a stable ≈12% share of a round across 100–500 peers. Under an observation-only local adversary, FLTorrent drives attribution success close to neighborhood-level random guessing for typical nodes, improves with network size, and remains robust under collusion. In LLM-scale dissemination stress tests over 7–10 Gbps access links, FLTorrent adds only ∼6−10% round-time overhead relative to BitTorrent-only. Overall, FLTorrent shows that within-round unlinkability and BitTorrent-level efficiency can co-exist with predictable, low overheads at scale.



This paper has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant
agreement No. 101178648.


Last updated on 05/08/2026 07:43:56 AM