FuSeFL: Fully Secure and Scalable Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing client data, making it attractive for privacy-sensitive domains. While existing approaches employ cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, or secure multiparty computation to mitigate inference attacks, including model inversion, membership inference, and gradient leakage, they often suffer from high computational and memory overheads. Moreover, many methods overlook the confidentiality of the global model itself, which may be proprietary and sensitive. These challenges limit the practicality of secure FL, especially in settings that involve large datasets and strict compliance requirements. We present FuSeFL, a Fully Secure and scalable FL scheme, which decentralizes training across client pairs using lightweight MPC, while confining the server's role to secure aggregation, client pairing, and routing. This design eliminates server bottlenecks, avoids full data offloading, and preserves full confidentiality of data, model, and updates throughout training. Based on our experiment, FuSeFL defends against unauthorized observation, reconstruction attacks, and inference attacks such as gradient leakage, membership inference, and inversion attacks, while achieving up to 13 × speedup in training time and 50% lower server memory usage compared to our baseline.