A Global Cyber Threat Resilient Cloud Collaboration Framework for Geographically Distributed Data Centers

Abstract

The rapid growth of geographically distributed cloud data centers has intensified the demand for secure, privacy-preserving, and resource-efficient collaboration among mutually untrusted cloud environments. This paper presents BlockFed, a blockchain-empowered federated learning framework designed to enable cyber-threat-resilient collaboration across geographically distributed data centers. In BlockFed, each data center independently trains local models using private workload data and shares only the computed gradients rather than raw data, with a centralized aggregation server through a secure blockchain layer. A Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism is employed to validate gradient transactions and maintain an immutable, tamper-resistant ledger, ensuring trust and integrity among participating entities. The centralized server aggregates blockchain-verified updates to construct a global model, which is iteratively redistributed to support collaborative learning. This integrated learning process enhances task-level resource demand prediction while simultaneously improving system security and operational efficiency across all participating data centers. Extensive simulations on the Google Cluster Dataset show that BlockFed outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including ISTM, ETP-WE, First-Fit, Best-Fit, and Random-Fit, in resource utilization, power consumption, and active server reduction. BlockFed achieves up to 7-81% higher resource utilization, 41-58% lower power consumption, and 31-65% fewer active servers, while attaining a cyber-threat estimation accuracy of 93.19%.