Abstract:The training of high-precision federated learning models consumes a large number of users’ local resources. The users who participate in the training can gain illegal profits by selling the jointly trained model without others’ permission. In order to protect the property rights of federated learning models, this study proposes a federated learning watermark based on backdoor (FLWB) by using the feature that deep learning backdoor technology maintains the accuracy of main tasks and only causes misclassification in a small number of trigger set samples. FLWB allows users who participate in the training to embed their own private watermarks in the local model and then map the private backdoor watermarks to the global model through the model aggregation in the cloud as the global watermark for federated learning. Then a stepwise training method is designed to enhance the expression effect of private backdoor watermarks in the global model so that FLWB can accommodate the private watermarks of the users without affecting the accuracy of the global model. Theoretical analysis proves the security of FLWB, and experiments verify that the global model can effectively accommodate the private watermarks of the users who participate in the training by only causing an accuracy loss of 1% of the main tasks through the stepwise training method. Finally, FLWB is tested by model compression and fine-tuning attacks. The results show that more than 80% of the watermarks can be retained when the model is compressed to 30% by FLWB, and more than 90% of the watermarks can be retained under four different fine-tuning attacks, which indicates the excellent robustness of FLWB.