English

Differentially Private Federated Learning: A Systematic Review

Cryptography and Security 2025-10-03 v4 Machine Learning

Abstract

In recent years, privacy and security concerns in machine learning have promoted trusted federated learning to the forefront of research. Differential privacy has emerged as the de facto standard for privacy protection in federated learning due to its rigorous mathematical foundation and provable guarantee. Despite extensive research on algorithms that incorporate differential privacy within federated learning, there remains an evident deficiency in systematic reviews that categorize and synthesize these studies. Our work presents a systematic overview of the differentially private federated learning. Existing taxonomies have not adequately considered objects and level of privacy protection provided by various differential privacy models in federated learning. To rectify this gap, we propose a new taxonomy of differentially private federated learning based on definition and guarantee of various differential privacy models and federated scenarios. Our classification allows for a clear delineation of the protected objects across various differential privacy models and their respective neighborhood levels within federated learning environments. Furthermore, we explore the applications of differential privacy in federated learning scenarios. Our work provide valuable insights into privacy-preserving federated learning and suggest practical directions for future research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.08299,
  title  = {Differentially Private Federated Learning: A Systematic Review},
  author = {Jie Fu and Yuan Hong and Xinpeng Ling and Leixia Wang and Xun Ran and Zhiyu Sun and Wendy Hui Wang and Zhili Chen and Yang Cao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.08299},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

36pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:26:18.218Z