# OLIVE: Oblivious Federated Learning on Trusted Execution Environment against the risk of sparsification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07165 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07165/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05492/) (2016)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [Renyi Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07476/) (2017)
- [Federated Learning with Differential Privacy: Algorithms and Performance Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00222/) (2019)
- [Deep Gradient Compression: Reducing the Communication Bandwidth for Distributed Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01887/) (2017)
- [Differentially Private Federated Learning: A Client Level Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07557/) (2017)
- [Robust and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning from Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02891/) (2019)
- [iDLG: Improved Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02610/) (2020)
- [Deep Models Under the GAN: Information Leakage from Collaborative Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07464/) (2017)
- [Beyond Inferring Class Representatives: User-Level Privacy Leakage From Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00535/) (2018)
- [Subsampled R'enyi Differential Privacy and Analytical Moments Accountant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00087/) (2018)
- [Differentially Private Learning with Adaptive Clipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03871/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning with Buffered Asynchronous Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06639/) (2021)
- [Amplification by Shuffling: From Local to Central Differential Privacy via Anonymity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12469/) (2018)
- [Protection Against Reconstruction and Its Applications in Private Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00984/) (2018)
- [The Distributed Discrete Gaussian Mechanism for Federated Learning with Secure Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06387/) (2021)
- [When the Curious Abandon Honesty: Federated Learning Is Not Private](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02918/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning for Emoji Prediction in a Mobile Keyboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04329/) (2019)
- [PPFL: Privacy-preserving Federated Learning with Trusted Execution Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14380/) (2021)
- [Federated Evaluation and Tuning for On-Device Personalization: System Design & Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08503/) (2021)
- [Local Differential Privacy based Federated Learning for Internet of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08856/) (2020)
- [The Privacy Blanket of the Shuffle Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02837/) (2019)
- [LDP-FL: Practical Private Aggregation in Federated Learning with Local Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15789/) (2020)
- [Rethinking gradient sparsification as total error minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00951/) (2021)
- [Chiron: Privacy-preserving Machine Learning as a Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05961/) (2018)
- [Communication Efficiency in Federated Learning: Achievements and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10996/) (2021)
- [Encode, Shuffle, Analyze Privacy Revisited: Formalizations and Empirical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03618/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [FedBone: Towards Large-Scale Federated Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17465/) (2023)
- [ULDP-FL: Federated Learning with Across Silo User-Level Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12210/) (2023)
- [On the Inference (In-)Security of Vertical Federated Learning: Efficient Auditing against Inference Tampering Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02376/) (2025)
- [QoS-Aware Token Scheduling and Private Data Valuation for Multi-Modal Agentic Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15573/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Combining Federated Learning (FL) with a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is a promising approach for realizing privacy-preserving FL, which has garnered significant academic attention in recent years. Implementing the TEE on the server side enables each round of FL to proceed without exposing the client's gradient information to untrusted servers. This addresses usability gaps in existing secure aggregation schemes as well as utility gaps in differentially private FL. However, to address the issue using a TEE, the vulnerabilities of server-side TEEs need to be considered -- this has not been sufficiently investigated in the context of FL. The main technical contribution of this study is the analysis of the vulnerabilities of TEE in FL and the defense. First, we theoretically analyze the leakage of memory access patterns, revealing the risk of sparsified gradients, which are commonly used in FL to enhance communication efficiency and model accuracy. Second, we devise an inference attack to link memory access patterns to sensitive information in the training dataset. Finally, we propose an oblivious yet efficient aggregation algorithm to prevent memory access pattern leakage. Our experiments on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method functions efficiently in practical scales.