# LightSecAgg: a Lightweight and Versatile Design for Secure Aggregation in Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14236 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14236/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [On the Convergence of FedAvg on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02189/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07481/) (2020)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01097/) (2018)
- [Inverting Gradients -- How easy is it to break privacy in federated learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14053/) (2020)
- [Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04221/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with Moreau Envelopes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08848/) (2020)
- [FedPAQ: A Communication-Efficient Federated Learning Method with Periodic Averaging and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13014/) (2019)
- [A Field Guide to Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06917/) (2021)
- [Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01804/) (2020)
- [Asynchronous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03934/) (2019)
- [Beyond Inferring Class Representatives: User-Level Privacy Leakage From Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00535/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning with Buffered Asynchronous Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06639/) (2021)
- [Learning from History for Byzantine Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10333/) (2020)
- [LDP-Fed: Federated Learning with Local Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03637/) (2020)
- [UVeQFed: Universal Vector Quantization for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03262/) (2020)
- [Byzantine-Resilient Secure Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11115/) (2020)
- [Turbo-Aggregate: Breaking the Quadratic Aggregation Barrier in Secure Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04156/) (2020)
- [Lagrange Coded Computing: Optimal Design for Resiliency, Security and Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00939/) (2018)
- [FastSecAgg: Scalable Secure Aggregation for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11248/) (2020)
- [Securing Secure Aggregation: Mitigating Multi-Round Privacy Leakage in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03328/) (2021)
- [Central Server Free Federated Learning over Single-sided Trust Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04956/) (2019)
- [Towards Non-I.I.D. and Invisible Data with FedNAS: Federated Deep Learning via Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08546/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [FedML-HE: An Efficient Homomorphic-Encryption-Based Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10837/) (2023)
- [LOKI: Large-scale Data Reconstruction Attack against Federated Learning through Model Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12233/) (2023)
- [GPT-FL: Generative Pre-trained Model-Assisted Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02210/) (2023)
- [Machine Unlearning of Federated Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16424/) (2022)
- [CodedPaddedFL and CodedSecAgg: Straggler Mitigation and Secure Aggregation in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08909/) (2021)
- [How Much Privacy Does Federated Learning with Secure Aggregation Guarantee?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02304/) (2022)
- [SwiftAgg+: Achieving Asymptotically Optimal Communication Loads in Secure Aggregation for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13060/) (2022)
- [FLINT: A Platform for Federated Learning Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12862/) (2023)
- [FedVS: Straggler-Resilient and Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning for Split Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13407/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: Multi-Round Single-Server Secure Aggregation with Applications to Private Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09883/) (2023)
- [FedGT: Identification of Malicious Clients in Federated Learning with Secure Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05506/) (2023)
- [SwiftAgg: Communication-Efficient and Dropout-Resistant Secure Aggregation for Federated Learning with Worst-Case Security Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04169/) (2022)
- [Fusion of Global and Local Knowledge for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11051/) (2023)
- [The Federation Strikes Back: A Survey of Federated Learning Privacy Attacks, Defenses, Applications, and Policy Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03636/) (2024)
- [Towards Federated RLHF with Aggregated Client Preference for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03038/) (2024)
- [Federated Learning Across Decentralized and Unshared Archives for Remote Sensing Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06141/) (2023)
- [Federated Analytics: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01326/) (2023)
- [The Resource Problem of Using Linear Layer Leakage Attack in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14868/) (2023)
- [Fundamental Limits of Hierarchical Secure Aggregation with Cyclic User Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04564/) (2025)
- [Fake It Till Make It: Federated Learning with Consensus-Oriented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05966/) (2023)
- [Breaking Secure Aggregation: Label Leakage from Aggregated Gradients in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15731/) (2024)
- [Proof-of-Contribution-Based Design for Collaborative Machine Learning on Blockchain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14031/) (2023)
- [Private Aggregation in Hierarchical Wireless Federated Learning with Partial and Full Collusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14088/) (2023)
- [Worldwide Federated Training of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14446/) (2024)
- [Efficient Node Selection in Private Personalized Decentralized Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12755/) (2023)
- [ByzSecAgg: A Byzantine-Resistant Secure Aggregation Scheme for Federated Learning Based on Coded Computing and Vector Commitment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09913/) (2023)
- [Secure Vertical Federated Learning Under Unreliable Connectivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16794/) (2023)
- [PriPrune: Quantifying and Preserving Privacy in Pruned Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19958/) (2023)
- [DecentNeRFs: Decentralized Neural Radiance Fields from Crowdsourced Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13199/) (2024)
- [Correlated Privacy Mechanisms for Differentially Private Distributed Mean Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03289/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Secure model aggregation is a key component of federated learning (FL) that aims at protecting the privacy of each user's individual model while allowing for their global aggregation. It can be applied to any aggregation-based FL approach for training a global or personalized model. Model aggregation needs to also be resilient against likely user dropouts in FL systems, making its design substantially more complex. State-of-the-art secure aggregation protocols rely on secret sharing of the random-seeds used for mask generations at the users to enable the reconstruction and cancellation of those belonging to the dropped users. The complexity of such approaches, however, grows substantially with the number of dropped users. We propose a new approach, named LightSecAgg, to overcome this bottleneck by changing the design from "random-seed reconstruction of the dropped users" to "one-shot aggregate-mask reconstruction of the active users via mask encoding/decoding". We show that LightSecAgg achieves the same privacy and dropout-resiliency guarantees as the state-of-the-art protocols while significantly reducing the overhead for resiliency against dropped users. We also demonstrate that, unlike existing schemes, LightSecAgg can be applied to secure aggregation in the asynchronous FL setting. Furthermore, we provide a modular system design and optimized on-device parallelization for scalable implementation, by enabling computational overlapping between model training and on-device encoding, as well as improving the speed of concurrent receiving and sending of chunked masks. We evaluate LightSecAgg via extensive experiments for training diverse models on various datasets in a realistic FL system with large number of users and demonstrate that LightSecAgg significantly reduces the total training time.