Defending Privacy Inference Attacks to Federated Learning for Intelligent IoT with Parameter Compression

Abstract

Federated learning has been popularly studied with people’s increasing awareness of privacy protection. It solves the problem of privacy leakage by its ability that allows many clients to train a collaborative model without uploading local data collected by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, there are still threats of privacy leakage in federated learning. The privacy inference attacks can reconstruct the privacy data of other clients based on GAN from the parameters in the process of iterations for global models. In this work, we are motivated to prevent GAN-based privacy inference attacks in federated learning. Inspired by the idea of gradient compression, we propose a defense method called Federated Learning Parameter Compression (FLPC) which can reduce the sharing of information for privacy protection. It prevents attackers from recovering the private information of victims while maintaining the accuracy of the global model. Extensive experimental results demonstrated that our method is effective in the prevention of GAN-based privacy inferring attacks. In addition, based on the experimental results, we propose a norm-based metric to assess the performance of privacy-preserving.