Netinfo Security ›› 2026, Vol. 26 ›› Issue (5): 788-808.doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1671-1122.2026.05.010

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TEE-Based Federated Learning Platform

LI Zihao, ZHANG Fengwei()   

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China
  • Received:2025-12-25 Online:2026-05-10 Published:2026-06-03

Abstract:

This paper presented a confidential federated learning platform (CFLP) based on trusted execution environments (TEEs) for typical vision tasks, aiming to evaluate the security-efficiency-accuracy trade-off of different privacy-enhancing technologies in federated learning. The platform utilized intel trust domain extensions (TDX) and software guard extensions (SGX) as its core architecture, while incorporating homomorphic encryption (HE) and secure multi-party computation (MPC) as performance comparison benchmarks. Systematic comparative experiments were conducted using this platform in high-dimensional vision task scenarios involving the CIFAR-10 dataset and the ResNet-18 model. The results indicate that, while maintaining baseline accuracy, the TDX-based TEE scheme provided virtual-machine-level hardware protection with only an approximately 1.3% increase in end-to-end latency, outperforming SGX, HE, and MPC in comprehensive performance. Although HE offers formally verifiable security, it increased the single-round training latency and communication overhead to approximately 9 times and 21 times that of the baseline, respectively, resulting in significant computational overhead. MPC exhibited limitations in the trade-off between time and communication costs. This study clarifies the applicable boundaries of various technical solutions, demonstrating that for secure aggregation scenarios involving high-dimensional models, TDX is a favorable option for balancing security requirements and performance overhead.

Key words: federated learning, privacy protection, confidential computing, trusted execution environment

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