Distributed $K$-Winners-Take-All With Privacy Protection: Method and Hardware Experiments

作者：Canbin Lin, Yinyan Zhang, Shuai Li · 发表于：IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.1109/tie.2026.3675190 · 被引用次数：1 · 研究领域：Cryptography and Data Security、Distributed systems and fault tolerance、Access Control and Trust

The$\boldsymbol{K}$-winners-take-all ($\boldsymbol{K}$-WTA) network aims to find the$\boldsymbol{K}$largest inputs as winners from$\boldsymbol{N}$inputs of network nodes. The existing distributed$\boldsymbol{K}$-WTA network models implement$\boldsymbol{K}$-WTA by interacting with the information between neighboring agents. However, the current distributed$\boldsymbol{K}$-WTA network models use plaintext to convey information. This is a great threat to the protection of private data. To solve the problem, this article proposes a novel privacy-preserving method for$\boldsymbol{K}$-WTA network models for the first time. The method includes a secret exchange protocol that combines homomorphic encryption and weight construction method to ensure the privacy of information against both internal eavesdropping adversaries and external eavesdropping adversaries. The theoretical analysis on privacy of the proposed method is provided. Finally, this article validates the model through software simulation and Raspberry Pi hardware experiments, proving its effectiveness and performance in practical applications.