PrivEraserVerify: Efficient, Private, and Verifiable Federated Unlearning

TL;DR

PrivEraserVerify is a novel federated unlearning framework that combines efficiency, privacy, and verifiability, enabling faster, privacy-preserving model updates with participant verification.

Contribution

It introduces a unified approach integrating adaptive checkpointing, differential privacy calibration, and fingerprint verification for federated unlearning.

Findings

Achieves 2-3x faster unlearning than retraining

Provides formal indistinguishability privacy guarantees

Supports scalable, decentralized verification

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, offering a promising path toward privacy preserving artificial intelligence. However, FL models may still memorize sensitive information from participants, conflicting with the right to be forgotten (RTBF). To meet these requirements, federated unlearning has emerged as a mechanism to remove the contribution of departing clients. Existing solutions only partially address this challenge: FedEraser improves efficiency but lacks privacy protection, FedRecovery ensures differential privacy (DP) but degrades accuracy, and VeriFi enables verifiability but introduces overhead without efficiency or privacy guarantees. We present PrivEraserVerify (PEV), a unified framework that integrates efficiency, privacy, and verifiability into federated unlearning. PEV employs (i) adaptive checkpointing to retain critical historical updates for fast reconstruction, (ii) layer adaptive differentially private calibration to selectively remove client influence while minimizing accuracy loss, and (iii) fingerprint based verification, enabling participants to confirm unlearning in a decentralized and noninvasive manner. Experiments on image, handwritten character, and medical datasets show that PEV achieves up to 2 to 3 times faster unlearning than retraining, provides formal indistinguishability guarantees with reduced performance degradation, and supports scalable verification. To the best of our knowledge, PEV is the first framework to simultaneously deliver efficiency, privacy, and verifiability for federated unlearning, moving FL closer to practical and regulation compliant deployment.