Federated Learning Research Articles

Centralised vs. decentralised federated load forecasting in smart buildings: Who holds the key to adversarial attack robustness?

The integration of AI and ML into energy forecasting is crucial for modern energy management. Federated Learning (FL) is particularly noteworthy because it enhances data privacy and facilitates collaboration among distributed energy resources. It enables model training across multiple locations while minimizing reliance on centralized servers and data transfers. However, FL faces significant security challenges, particularly from adversarial attacks that can undermine the models' integrity and reliability. This paper addresses these security concerns by evaluating the effectiveness of Centralized Federated Learning (CFL) and Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) in distributed load forecasting. We conducted a comparative analysis using two publicly available datasets, household data and smart grid data, for short-term load forecasting. Our study finds that DFL is more robust against adversarial attacks and artificial noise compared to CFL. Specifically, adversarial model poisoning attacks impact only the targeted client in DFL, while CFL is more broadly affected. For instance, in the presence of attacks, CFL's average client Mean Absolute Error (MAE) increased from 0.084 to 0.78 kWh for Dataset 1 and from 0.475 to 11.159 MW for Dataset 2, whereas DFL maintained relatively low error rates. Conversely, artificial noise had a less pronounced effect on CFL compared to DFL. Additionally, we introduce Decentralized Random Layer Aggregation (DRLA) to enhance DFL's robustness, offering further insights into improving FL methodologies in the energy sector. Our findings also indicate that only a single layer of the neural network is required for local updates during the aggregation process in DFL.

Privacy Preserving Technology using Federated Learning and Blockchain in protecting against Adversarial Attacks for Retinal Imaging

PurposeCollaboration provides valuable data for robust artificial intelligence (AI) model development. Federated learning (FL) is a privacy enhancing technology that allows collaboration while respecting privacy via the development of models without raw data transfer. However state-of-the-art FL models still face challenges in non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) health care settings and remain susceptible to privacy breaches. We propose a novel FL framework coupled with blockchain technology to address these challenges. DesignRetrospective multicohort study Subjects and Methods27,145 images from Singapore, China and Taiwan were used to design a novel FL aggregation method for the detection of myopic macular degeneration (MMD) from fundus photographs and macular disease from optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans in feature distribution skew and label distribution imbalance scenarios. We further performed adversarial attacks (label flipping and clean label). As proof of concept, blockchain was incorporated into FL to demonstrate secure transfer of model updates across collaborating sites. Main Outcome MeasuresWe evaluated our FL model performance in MMD and OCT classification and compared our model against state-of the-art FL and centralized models. ResultsOur FL model showed robust performance with areas under the receiving operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.868±0.009 for MMD detection and 0.970±0.012 for OCT macular disease classification. In label flipping attack, our FL model had an AUC of 0.861±0.019, similar to the centralized model (AUC 0.856± 0.015) and higher than other FL models (AUC 0.578–0.819) In clean label attack, our FL model had an AUC of 0.878±0.006 which was comparable to the centralized model (AUC 0.878±0.001) and superior to other state-of-the-art FL models with AUC of 0.529-0.838. Simulation showed that the additional time with blockchain in one global epoch was around 5 seconds. The addition of blockchain to the FL framework was feasible with a minimal impact on model development time. ConclusionsOur proposed FL algorithm overcomes the shortcoming of the traditional FL in non i.i.d. situations and remains robust to against adversarial attacks. The integration of blockchain adds further security during the transfer of model updates. Blockchain-enabled FL can be a trusted platform for collaborative health AI research.

Enabling efficient and low-effort decentralized federated learning with the EdgeFL framework

Context:Federated Learning (FL) has gained prominence as a solution for preserving data privacy in machine learning applications. However, existing FL frameworks pose challenges for software engineers due to implementation complexity, limited customization options, and scalability issues. These limitations prevent the practical deployment of FL, especially in dynamic and resource-constrained edge environments, preventing its widespread adoption. Objective:To address these challenges, we propose EdgeFL, an efficient and low-effort FL framework designed to overcome centralized aggregation, implementation complexity and scalability limitations. EdgeFL applies a decentralized architecture that eliminates reliance on a central server by enabling direct model training and aggregation among edge nodes, which enhances fault tolerance and adaptability to diverse edge environments. Methods:We conducted experiments and a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of EdgeFL. Our approach focuses on reducing weight update latency and facilitating faster model evolution on edge devices. Results:Our findings indicate that EdgeFL outperforms existing FL frameworks in terms of learning efficiency and performance. By enabling quicker model evolution on edge devices, EdgeFL enhances overall efficiency and responsiveness to changing data patterns. Conclusion:EdgeFL offers a solution for software engineers and companies seeking the benefits of FL, while effectively overcoming the challenges and privacy concerns associated with traditional FL frameworks. Its decentralized approach, simplified implementation, combined with enhanced customization and fault tolerance, make it suitable for diverse applications and industries.

A Distributed Intrusion Detection Framework for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks via Federated Learning and Blockchain

The emergence of connected vehicles via Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) has revolutionized transportation but has also brought forth challenges in security and privacy due to their open architecture. Early detection of intrusions within VANETs is paramount for ensuring safe communication. This research presents an intelligent distributed approach that leverages federated learning (FL) and blockchain for intrusion detection in VANETs. Through FL, various neural network models were implemented to distribute model training among vehicles, thus preserving privacy. Quantitative evaluation metrics demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. For example, compared to a traditionally trained Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) model, the Federated Trained Model achieved higher precision across various attack types, ranging from 68% to 94%, and consistently outperformed in terms of recall, with rates ranging from 57% to 88%. These results highlight FL's superiority in detecting intrusions, evidenced by gains in accuracy, recall, and precision. Integration of FL with blockchain further strengthened security and privacy protection, ensuring data integrity during collaborative FL training across decentralized nodes. This novel framework addresses VANET vulnerabilities by facilitating privacy-preserving, collaborative anomaly monitoring in a trustworthy manner. Evaluations validate the performance advantages of FL for intrusion identification, supporting wider adoption of vehicular technologies. The study underscores the potential of combining FL and blockchain to enable robust, cooperative abnormality recognition crucial for maintaining reliability, safety, and trust in VANET operations.

Heart Sound Abnormality Detection From Multi-Institutional Collaboration: Introducing a Federated Learning Framework.

Early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases is a crucial task in medical practice. With the application of computer audition in the healthcare field, artificial intelligence (AI) has been applied to clinical non-invasive intelligent auscultation of heart sounds to provide rapid and effective pre-screening. However, AI models generally require large amounts of data which may cause privacy issues. Unfortunately, it is difficult to collect large amounts of healthcare data from a single centre. In this study, we propose federated learning (FL) optimisation strategies for the practical application in multi-centre institutional heart sound databases. The horizontal FL is mainly employed to tackle the privacy problem by aligning the feature spaces of FL participating institutions without information leakage. In addition, techniques based on deep learning have poor interpretability due to their "black-box" property, which limits the feasibility of AI in real medical data. To this end, vertical FL is utilised to address the issues of model interpretability and data scarcity. Experimental results demonstrate that, the proposed FL framework can achieve good performance for heart sound abnormality detection by taking the personal privacy protection into account. Moreover, using the federated feature space is beneficial to balance the interpretability of the vertical FL and the privacy of the data. This work realises the potential of FL from research to clinical practice, and is expected to have extensive application in the federated smart medical system.

DB-FL: DAG blockchain-enabled generalized federated dropout learning

To protect user privacy and data security, the integration of Federated Learning (FL) and blockchain has become an emerging research hotspot. However, the limited throughput and high communication complexity of traditional blockchains limit their application in large-scale FL tasks, and the synchronous traditional FL will also reduce the training efficiency. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) blockchain-enabled generalized Federated Dropout (FD) learning strategy, which could improve the efficiency of FL while ensuring the model generalization. Specifically, the DAG maintained by multiple edge servers will guarantee the security and traceability of the data, and the Reputation-based Tips Selection Algorithm (RTSA) is proposed to reduce the blockchain consensus delay. Second, the semi-asynchronous training among Intelligent Devices (IDs) is adopted to improve the training efficiency, and a reputation-based FD technology is proposed to prevent overfitting of the model. In addition, a Hybrid Optimal Resource Allocation (HORA) algorithm is introduced to minimize the network delay. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithms.

Federated Diverse Self-ensembling Learning Approach for Data Heterogenity in Drive Vision

Federated learning (FL) has developed as an efficient framework that can be used to train models across isolated data sources while also protecting the privacy of the data. In FL a common method is to construct local and global models together, with the global model (server) informing the local models and the local models (clients) updating the global model. Most present works assume clients have labeled datasets and the server has no data for supervised learning (SL) problems. In reality, clients lack the competence and drive to identify their data, while the server may host a tiny amount. How to reasonably use serverlabeled and client-unlabeled data is crucial in semi-supervised learning (SSL) and Cclientdata heterogeneity is widespread in FL. However, inadequate high-quality labels and non-IID client data, especially in autonomous driving, decrease model performance across domains and interact negatively. To solve this Semi-Supervised Federated Learning (SSFL) problem, we come up with a new FL algorithm called FedDSL in this work. We use self-ensemble learning and complementary negative learning in our method to make clients’ unsupervised learning on unlabeled data more accurate and efficient. It also coordinates the model training on both the server side and the clients’ side. In an important distinction to earlier research that kept some subset of labels at each client, our method is the first to implement SSFL for clients with 0% labeled non-IID data. Our contributions include the effectiveness of self-ensemble learning by using confidence score vector for calculating only for the current model performing data filtering and initiated negative learning by showing the data filtering performance in the beginning rounds. Our approach has been rigorously validated on two significant autonomous driving datasets, BDD100K and Cityscapes, proving to be highly effective. We have achieved state-of-the-art results and the metric that is utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of each detection task is mean average precision (mAP@0.5). Astonishingly FedDSL performs nearly as well as fully-supervised centralized training approaches, despite the fact that it only uses 25% of the labels in the Global model.

FedDA: Resource-adaptive federated learning with dual-alignment aggregation optimization for heterogeneous edge devices

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed learning paradigm that allows multiple clients to collaborate on training a global model without sharing their local data. However, in practical heterogeneous edge device scenarios, FL faces the challenges of system heterogeneity and data heterogeneity, which leads to unfair participation and degraded global model performance. In this paper, we introduce FedDA, a resource-adaptive FL framework, which adapts to the client’s computing resources by assigning heterogeneous models of different sizes. To improve the performance of heterogeneous model aggregation and adjust to non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) data, we propose a dual-alignment aggregation optimization method, i.e., parameter feature space alignment and output space alignment. Specifically, FedDA exploits the permutation symmetry property of weight space to permutate the model parameter positions via an adaptive layer-wise matching method, thereby aligning models with significant deviations in parameter feature space. FedDA mitigates the imbalance in parameter quantity between smaller and larger models through parameter expansion. Additionally, FedDA maps client labels into a uniform embedding space through output space alignment, thus reducing model parameter deviations due to non-i.i.d. data without additional client-side computing overhead. We evaluate the performance of FedDA on benchmark datasets, including FashionMNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and AGNews. Experimental results demonstrate that FedDA achieves up to 8.71% improvement in model accuracy compared to baseline methods, highlighting its effectiveness in addressing the challenges of heterogeneity.

Toward data efficient anomaly detection in heterogeneous edge-cloud environments using clustered federated learning

Anomaly detection in edge-cloud scenarios stands as a critical means to ensure the security of network environment. Federated learning (FL)-based anomaly detection combines multiple data sources and ensures data privacy, making it a promising distributed detection method. However, FL-based anomaly detection system is usually affected by data heterogeneity and data bias, resulting in the inefficiency of data used for FL and the decline of detection performance. We propose an iterative federated clustering ensemble algorithm named IFCEA, in which we (1) establish a committee on the devices, and select the optimal participation for each device based on the evaluations of committee; (2) filter the clusters based on committee results, and exclude the biased clusters; (3) design an aggregation weight that reflects the degree of local distribution balance; (4) present a novel cluster initialization method, OneBiPartition, which adapts to the number of clusters and commences clustering federated task efficiently. IFCEA enhances the data quality used in FL-based anomaly detection system from two perspectives: device selection and participation weights, effectively addressing the issues of data heterogeneity and data bias faced during the FL training phase. Extensive experimental results on five network traffic datasets (the UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS2017, CIC-IDS2018, CIC-DDoS2019 and BCCC-DDoS2024 datasets) demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms in terms of detection metrics and convergence performance.

Practical and Robust Federated Learning With Highly Scalable Regression Training.

Privacy-preserving federated learning, as one of the privacy-preserving computation techniques, is a promising distributed and privacy-preserving machine learning (ML) approach for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), due to its ability to train a regression model without collecting raw data of data owners (DOs). However, traditional interactive federated regression training (IFRT) schemes rely on multiple rounds of communication to train a global model and are still under various privacy and security threats. To overcome these problems, several noninteractive federated regression training (NFRT) schemes have been proposed and applied in a variety of scenarios. However, there are still several challenges: 1) how to protect the privacy of DOs' local dataset; 2) how to realize highly scalable regression training without linear dependence on sample dimension; 3) how to tolerate DOs' dropout; and 4) how to enable DOs to verify the correctness of aggregated results returned from the cloud service provider (CSP). In this article, we propose two practical noninteractive federated learning schemes with privacy-preserving for IoMT, named homomorphic encryption based NFRT (HE-NFRT) and double-masking protocol based NFRT (Mask-NFRT), respectively, which are based on a comprehensive consideration of NFRT, privacy concerns, high-efficiency, robustness, and verification mechanism. The security analyses display that our proposed schemes are able to protect the privacy of DOs' local training data, resist collusion attack, and support strong verification to each DO. The performance evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed HE-NFRT scheme is desirable for a high-dimensional and high-security IoMT application while Mask-NFRT scheme is desirable for a high-dimensional and large-scale IoMT application.

Multi-round decentralized dataset distillation with federated learning for Low Earth Orbit satellite communication

Satellite communication and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are important components of the 6G network, widely used for Earth observation tasks due to their low cost and short return period, making them a key technology for 6G network connectivity. Due to limitations in satellite system technology and downlink bandwidth, it is not feasible to download all high-resolution image information to ground stations. Even in existing federated learning (FL) methods, sharing well-trained parts of the model can still bottleneck with increasing model size. To address these challenges, we propose a new federated learning framework (FL-M3D) for LEO satellite communication that employs multi-round decentralized dataset distillation techniques. It allows satellites to independently extract local datasets and transmit them to ground stations instead of exchanging model parameters. Communication costs depend only on the size of the synthesized dataset and do not increase with larger models. However, the heterogeneity of satellite datasets can lead to sample ambiguity and decreased model convergence speed. Therefore, we propose distilling the datasets to mitigate the negative effects of data heterogeneity. Through experiments using real-world image datasets, FL-M3D reduces communication volume in simulated satellite networks by approximately 49.84% and achieves improved model performance.

Leveraging blockchain and federated learning in Edge-Fog-Cloud computing environments for intelligent decision-making with ECG data in IoT

Blockchain technology combined with Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising solution for enhancing privacy, security, and efficiency in medical IoT applications across edge, fog, and cloud computing environments. This approach enables multiple medical IoT devices at the network edge to collaboratively train a global machine learning model without sharing raw data, addressing privacy concerns associated with centralized data storage. This paper presents a blockchain and FL-based Smart Decision Making framework for ECG data in microservice-based IoT medical applications. Leveraging edge/fog computing for real-time critical applications, the framework implements a FL model across edge, fog, and cloud layers. Evaluation criteria including energy consumption, latency, execution time, cost, and network usage show that edge-based deployment outperforms fog and cloud, with significant advantages in energy consumption (0.1% vs. Fog, 0.9% vs. Cloud), network usage (1.1% vs. Fog, 31% vs. Cloud), cost (3% vs. Fog, 20% vs. Cloud), execution time (16% vs. Fog, 28% vs. Cloud), and latency (1% vs. Fog, 79% vs. Cloud).

FedATA: Adaptive Attention Aggregation For Federated Self-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Pre-trained on large-scale datasets has profoundly promoted the development of deep learning models in medical image analysis. For medical image segmentation, collecting a large number of labeled volumetric medical images from multiple institutions is an enormous challenge due to privacy concerns. Self-supervised learning with mask image modeling (MIM) can learn general representation without annotations. Integrating MIM into FL enables collaborative learning of an efficient pre-trained model from unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning with limited annotations. However, setting pixels as reconstruction targets in traditional MIM fails to facilitate robust representation learning due to the medical image's complexity and distinct characteristics. On the other hand, the generalization of the aggregated model in FL is also impaired under the heterogeneous data distributions among institutions. To address these issues, we proposed a novel self-supervised federated learning, which combines masked self-distillation with adaptive attention federated learning. Such incorporation enjoys two vital benefits. First, masked self-distillation sets high-quality latent representations of masked tokens as the target, improving the descriptive capability of the learned presentation rather than reconstructing low-level pixels. Second, adaptive attention aggregation with Personalized federate learning effectively captures specific-related representation from the aggregated model, thus facilitating local fine-tuning performance for target tasks. We conducted comprehensive experiments on two medical segmentation tasks using a large-scale dataset consisting of volumetric medical images from multiple institutions, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing federated self-supervised learning approaches.

A joint vehicular device scheduling and uncertain resource management scheme for Federated Learning in Internet of Vehicles

Federated learning (FL) offers an effective framework for the efficient process in vehicular edge computing. However, FL encompasses the process of distributing and uploading model parameters, which are inevitably transmitted in a wireless network environment. Some challenges in FL-assisted Internet of Vehicles (IoV) sceneries gradually emerging, such as data heterogeneity, concerned device resources, and unstable communication environment, which necessitate intelligent vehicle selection schemes that accelerate training efficiency. Based on these, we consider a new scenario, specifically an FL-assisted IoV system under uncertain communication conditions, and develop an interval many-objective vehicle selection and bandwidth allocation (IMoVSBA) joint optimization scheme. This scheme takes into account computation latency, energy consumption, server utilization, and data quality, while meeting multi-criteria resource optimization requirements. Among these, server utilization is a new objective designed specifically for this joint optimization problem. For the proposed problem, a novel interval many-objective evolutionary algorithm with individual comprehensive indicator to control the evolution direction (IMaOEACI) is designed. Simulation results demonstrate that this method outperforms other schemes in terms of accuracy, training cost, and server utilization, effectively improving training efficiency in wireless channel environments and reasonably utilizing bandwidth resources. It provides significant scientific value and application potential in the field of the IoVs.

Performance analysis and evaluation of postquantum secure blockchained federated learning

As the field of quantum computing progresses, traditional cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECDSA are becoming increasingly vulnerable to quantum-based attacks, underscoring the need for robust post-quantum security in critical systems like Federated Learning (FL) and Blockchain. In light of this, we propose a novel hybrid approach for blockchain-based FL (BFL) that integrates a stateless signature scheme, such as Dilithium or Falcon, with a stateful hash-based scheme like XMSS. This combination leverages the complementary strengths of both schemes to provide enhanced security. To further optimize performance, we introduce a linear formula-based device role selection method that takes into account key factors such as computational power and stake accumulation. This selection process is reinforced by a verifiable random function (VRF), which strengthens the blockchain consensus mechanism. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that this hybrid approach significantly enhances both the security and efficiency of BFL systems, establishing a robust framework for the integration of post-quantum cryptography as we transition into the quantum computing era.

Adaptive compressed learning boosts both efficiency and utility of differentially private federated learning

In the federated learning (FL) research field, current research is confronted with several pivotal challenges, e.g., data privacy, model utility and communication efficiency. Furthermore, these challenges are further amplified by statistical data heterogeneous in the FL system. Thus, a novel Communication-efficient and Utility-assured Gaussian differential privacy-based Personalized Federated Adaptive Compressed Learning method, called CUG-PFACL, is proposed. Specifically, an end-to-end local adaptive compressed learning strategy is designed, including three crucial modules, namely the measurement matrix, the personalized compressed data transformation and the local model. Especially, jointly training the measurement matrix module and the personalized compressed data transformation module can mitigate the inherent statistical heterogeneity while preserving all important characteristics of the compressed private data of each local client, and alleviate the additional heterogeneity induced by Gaussian differential privacy in each global communication round. Numerous experimental simulation and comparisons demonstrate that CUG-PFACL has three notable advantages: data privacy guarantee, enhanced personalized model utility and high-efficient communication.

FedADMM-InSa: An inexact and self-adaptive ADMM for federated learning

Federated learning (FL) is a promising framework for learning from distributed data while maintaining privacy. The development of efficient FL algorithms encounters various challenges, including heterogeneous data and systems, limited communication capacities, and constrained local computational resources. Recently developed FedADMM methods show great resilience to both data and system heterogeneity. However, they still suffer from performance deterioration if the hyperparameters are not carefully tuned. To address this issue, we propose an inexact and self-adaptive FedADMM algorithm, termed FedADMM-InSa. First, we design an inexactness criterion for the clients’ local updates to eliminate the need for empirically setting the local training accuracy. This inexactness criterion can be assessed by each client independently based on its unique condition, thereby reducing the local computational cost and mitigating the undesirable straggle effect. The convergence of the resulting inexact ADMM is proved under the assumption of strongly convex loss functions. Additionally, we present a self-adaptive scheme that dynamically adjusts each client’s penalty parameter, enhancing algorithm robustness by mitigating the need for empirical penalty parameter choices for each client. Extensive numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets have been conducted. As validated by some tests, our FedADMM-InSa algorithm improves model accuracy by 7.8% while reducing clients’ local workloads by 55.7% compared to benchmark algorithms.

MemberShield: A framework for federated learning with membership privacy

Federated Learning (FL) allows multiple data owners to build high-quality deep learning models collaboratively, by sharing only model updates and keeping data on their premises. Even though FL offers privacy-by-design, it is vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIA), where an adversary tries to determine whether a sample was included in the training data. Existing defenses against MIA cannot offer meaningful privacy protection without significantly hampering the model’s utility and causing a non-negligible training overhead. In this paper we analyze the underlying causes of the differences in the model behavior for member and non-member samples, which arise from model overfitting and facilitate MIAs. Accordingly, we propose MemberShield, a generalization-based defense method for MIAs that consists of: (i) one-time preprocessing of each client’s training data labels that transforms one-hot encoded labels to soft labels and eventually exploits them in local training, and (ii) early stopping the training when the local model’s validation accuracy does not improve on that of the global model for a number of epochs. Extensive empirical evaluations on three widely used datasets and four model architectures demonstrate that MemberShield outperforms state-of-the-art defense methods by delivering substantially better practical privacy protection against all forms of MIAs, while better preserving the target model utility. On top of that, our proposal significantly reduces training time and is straightforward to implement, by just tuning a single hyperparameter.

Edge-assisted U-Shaped Split Federated Learning with privacy-preserving for Internet of Things

In the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT), deploying deep learning models to process data generated or collected by IoT devices is a critical challenge. However, direct data transmission can cause network congestion and inefficient execution, given that IoT devices typically lack computation and communication capabilities. Centralized data processing in data centers is also no longer feasible due to concerns over data privacy and security. To address these challenges, we present an innovative Edge-assisted U-Shaped Split Federated Learning (EUSFL) framework, which harnesses the high-performance capabilities of edge servers to assist IoT devices in model training and optimization process. In this framework, we leverage Federated Learning (FL) to enable data holders to collaboratively train models without sharing their data, thereby enhancing data privacy protection by transmitting only model parameters. Additionally, inspired by Split Learning (SL), we split the neural network into three parts using U-shaped splitting for local training on IoT devices. By exploiting the greater computation capability of edge servers, our framework effectively reduces overall training time and allows IoT devices with varying capabilities to perform training tasks efficiently. Furthermore, we proposed a novel noise mechanism called LabelDP to ensure that data features and labels can securely resist reconstruction attacks, eliminating the risk of privacy leakage. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that EUSFL can be integrated with various aggregation algorithms, maintaining good performance across different computing capabilities of IoT devices, and significantly reducing training time and local computation overhead.

Fed-Evolver: An automated evolving approach for federated Intrusion Detection System using adversarial autoencoder in SDN-enabled networks

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have garnered escalating significance in response to the evolving landscape of cyberattacks, driven by the adaptability and versatility of Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based networks in enhancing security orchestration. Although Machine Learning (ML) models have been developed for IDS, they require large amounts of labeled data to achieve high performance. However, acquiring labels for attacks is a time-consuming process and can cause problems in deploying the existing ML models in new systems or lower performance due to a shortage of labeled data on pre-trained datasets. Additionally, such ML-based IDS models lack the self-learning function to automatically adapt to new cyberattacks during network operations. To overcome these challenges, our work proposes Fed-Evolver, an automated evolving approach for federated IDS that combines Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Auto Encoder (AE) and a semi-supervised adversarial Autoencoder (SSAAE) for spotting intrusion actions. Our Fed-Evolver leverages supervised and unsupervised learning strategies to build efficient IDS models in the context of labeled data scarcity with the help of Federated Learning (FL). It allows data owners to collaborate for training intrusion detection models to provide the self-evolving capability in SDN-enabled networks. Our proposed framework is evaluated on 6 cyberattack datasets, including CICIDS2018, CIC-ToN-IoT, NF-UNSW-NB15, InSDN, InSecLab-IDS2021, DNP3 Intrusion Detection, and it outperforms other ML methods even when trained with only 1% proportion of labeled data, achieving consistently high performance across all metrics on the datasets.