ML Security PapersSpectral Sentinel: Scalable Byzantine-Robust Decentralized Federated Learning via Sketched Random Matrix Theory on Blockchain
Animesh Mishra · Seoul National University
Spectral Sentinel defends federated learning from Byzantine gradient poisoning using random matrix theory to detect anomalous eigenspectra at billion-parameter scale
Decentralized federated learning (DFL) enables collaborative model training without centralized trust, but it remains vulnerable to Byzantine clients that poison gradients under heterogeneous (Non-IID) data. Existing defenses face a scalability trilemma: distance-based filtering (e.g., Krum) can reject legitimate Non-IID updates, geometric-median methods incur prohibitive $O(n^2 d)$ cost, and many certified defenses are evaluated only on models below 100M parameters. We propose Spectral Sentinel, a Byzantine detection and aggregation framework that leverages a random-matrix-theoretic signature: honest Non-IID gradients produce covariance eigenspectra whose bulk follows the Marchenko-Pastur law, while Byzantine perturbations induce detectable tail anomalies. Our algorithm combines Frequent Directions sketching with data-dependent MP tracking, enabling detection on models up to 1.5B parameters using $O(k^2)$ memory with $k \ll d$. Under a $(σ,f)$ threat model with coordinate-wise honest variance bounded by $σ^2$ and $f < 1/2$ adversaries, we prove $(ε,δ)$-Byzantine resilience with convergence rate $O(σf / \sqrt{T} + f^2 / T)$, and we provide a matching information-theoretic lower bound $Ω(σf / \sqrt{T})$, establishing minimax optimality. We implement the full system with blockchain integration on Polygon networks and validate it across 144 attack-aggregator configurations, achieving 78.4 percent average accuracy versus 48-63 percent for baseline methods.