🔧Challenges
Challenges Faced During Development
Building the decentralized system was not without its hurdles. Several key challenges arose, each requiring innovative solutions and extensive research to overcome:
1. Encryption Complexity and Synchronization
Challenge:
Implementing and integrating Pedersen Commitments, Paillier Cryptosystem, and AES Encryption was one of the most complex aspects of the project.
Each cryptographic scheme has unique properties, making it difficult to align them for seamless operation.
Ensuring compatibility and proper synchronization between these schemes while maintaining security and efficiency was a major technical hurdle.
Solution:
Focused on defining clear workflows for each encryption scheme, identifying their strengths, and deciding how to use them optimally.
Conducted rigorous testing to ensure the outputs from one encryption scheme could feed into another where required.
2. Maintaining Decentralization While Balancing On-Chain and Off-Chain Workloads
Challenge:
A core objective was to ensure the system remained truly decentralized, leveraging blockchains like Ethereum for aggregation and verification layers.
On-chain computations are inherently slower and significantly more expensive than off-chain alternatives, making it critical to decide which components should remain on-chain and which could be moved off-chain without compromising decentralization.
Solution:
Adopted a hybrid approach:
Kept critical actions such as aggregation, verification, and staking on-chain for transparency and trust.
Delegated intensive computations (e.g., local training) and storage operations (e.g., model files) to off-chain systems like Walrus.
Implemented decentralized checks and balances to ensure the off-chain operations were verifiable on-chain.
3. Lack of Established Resources and Research-Driven Implementation
Challenge:
There was no comprehensive guide or existing implementation for the problem we aimed to solve.
This required us to delve into academic research papers to understand the intricacies of cryptographic schemes, federated learning, and decentralized systems.
Translating theoretical concepts into practical, functional code was time-consuming and intellectually demanding.
Solution:
Dedicated significant time to reading and analyzing research papers, focusing on cryptographic primitives and their applications in secure federated learning.
Iteratively implemented, tested, and refined concepts derived from research until a reliable system was built.
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