In this paper, we study the fundamental limits of hierarchical secure aggregation under unreliable communication. We consider a hierarchical network where each client connects to multiple relays, and both client-to-relay and relay-to-server links are intermittent. Under this setting, we characterize the minimum communication and randomness costs required to achieve robust secure aggregation. We then propose an optimal protocol that attains these minimum costs, and establish its optimality through a matching converse proof. In addition, we introduce an improved problem formulation that bridges the gap between existing information-theoretic secure aggregation protocols and practical real-world federated learning problems.
@article{arxiv.2601.12853,
title = {On Resilient and Efficient Linear Secure Aggregation in Hierarchical Federated Learning},
author = {Shudi Weng and Xiang Zhang and Yizhou Zhao and Giuseppe Caire and Ming Xiao and Mikael Skoglund},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.12853},
year = {2026}
}