Can One Safety Loop Guard Them All? Agentic Guard Rails for Federated Computing

TL;DR

Guardian-FC introduces a flexible, modular framework for privacy-preserving federated computing that unifies safety enforcement across multiple cryptographic and statistical privacy techniques, ensuring risk management and extensibility.

Contribution

It proposes a backend-neutral, plug-in based architecture with an agentic control plane for safety, enabling unified risk management across diverse privacy mechanisms in federated computing.

Findings

Framework supports multiple privacy back-ends seamlessly.

Qualitative scenarios demonstrate backend-agnostic safety enforcement.

Formal foundation enables verification and auditability.

Abstract

We propose Guardian-FC, a novel two-layer framework for privacy preserving federated computing that unifies safety enforcement across diverse privacy preserving mechanisms, including cryptographic back-ends like fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and multiparty computation (MPC), as well as statistical techniques such as differential privacy (DP). Guardian-FC decouples guard-rails from privacy mechanisms by executing plug-ins (modular computation units), written in a backend-neutral, domain-specific language (DSL) designed specifically for federated computing workflows and interchangeable Execution Providers (EPs), which implement DSL operations for various privacy back-ends. An Agentic-AI control plane enforces a finite-state safety loop through signed telemetry and commands, ensuring consistent risk management and auditability. The manifest-centric design supports fail-fast job admission and seamless extensibility to new privacy back-ends. We present qualitative scenarios illustrating backend-agnostic safety and a formal model foundation for verification. Finally, we outline a research agenda inviting the community to advance adaptive guard-rail tuning, multi-backend composition, DSL specification development, implementation, and compiler extensibility alongside human-override usability.