DecoyTrace is a proactive cyber‑deception defense designed for strictly serverless decentralized federated learning (DFL). It deploys mobile DecoyNodes that generate chaotic decoy challenges, disseminate dual models (clean vs. decoy) based on neighbor trust, and use three‑state semantic metrics to isolate malicious sources and recover models. Across sixty configurations on the NEBULA platform, DecoyTrace restores model utility with minimal performance loss and reduces CPU and network usage by up to two‑thirds.
arXiv:2608.21137v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) promises trust-free collaborative learning by replacing the centralized parameter server with peer-to-peer model...
arXiv:2609.40312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Lossy compression is widely used in Federated Learning (FL) but is generally treated as an error source, while conventional poisoning defenses inspect...
The paper introduces FedMAST, a Federated Multi‑Axis Structural Tracing defense designed to detect and contain backdoor attacks in federated learning. FedMAST evaluates client updates through complementary structural, spectral, and historical evidence, applying tiered filtering and round‑level containment. In experiments across six backdoor attacks, FedMAST consistently achieves lower attack success rates while preserving high main‑task accuracy.
The paper introduces Fed-ADR, a coordinated attack framework where a malicious orchestrator server directs heterogeneous adversarial clients to adapt their gradient updates in real time, thereby evading existing federated learning defenses and drastically reducing global model accuracy. It also presents a lightweight detection mechanism that estimates true client gradients from historical data to spot coordinated attacks, and an in-situ recovery method that restores model performance without restarting training. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and CIFAR‑10 show the attack can drop accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, while the defense can recover accuracy to above 90% within a few rounds at a computational cost at least 20× lower than retraining from scratch.
arXiv:2609.37367v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decentralized large language model (LLM) fine-tuning lets organizations collaboratively train a shared LLM on data they cannot pool, without a centra...
arXiv:2606. 30479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mitigating an observed adversary in an enterprise network typically takes weeks of expert work: an analyst derives a mitigation tailored to that adversary, validates it without breaking production, and verifies it disrupts the specific attack.
arXiv:2606. 07857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rise of edge-based machine learning has enabled distributed adaptation of language models across mobile and IoT devices, offering privacy preservation and real-time responsiveness.
FedNIA is a defense framework for federated learning that identifies and excludes malicious clients without needing a central test dataset. It works by injecting random noise inputs and analyzing layerwise activation patterns with an autoencoder to detect abnormal behaviors caused by data poisoning. The method can counter various attack types—including sample poisoning, label flipping, and backdoors—even when multiple attackers collaborate, and shows strong performance on non‑iid federated datasets.
The paper introduces TrustShiftProbe, a framework that characterizes and defends against staged trust attacks on Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. It defines a temporal threat model where a compromised server behaves benignly during conditioning and later delivers adversarial payloads, and presents a multi‑tier runtime defense called SHIELD that reduces attack success from 69.5% to 42.7%. The work also provides a taxonomy of nine TrustShift variants across different execution mechanisms and objectives.
arXiv:2608. 09732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based agent systems.
FedLNS is a server‑side framework that screens federated learning updates by representing each client’s contribution through changes in trainable normalization‑layer parameters, creating lightweight signatures that can be compared against a history‑aware cross‑client reference. The method requires no extra client‑to‑server communication, raw data, or labeled attack examples, and after screening, the remaining full‑model updates are aggregated with standard federated learning rules. Experiments on GPT‑style, BERT‑style, and LLaMA‑style models with 200 clients demonstrate that FedLNS achieves lower test perplexity than six baselines even when 40% of the population performs target manipulation under both IID and non‑IID data partitions.
The paper introduces FedIoC, a federated learning framework that embeds structured threat indicators into gradient updates using a supervised contrastive loss. By aligning gradients from clients that share indicators for the same attack campaign, the server can cluster updates via cosine similarity to recover global campaign patterns without transmitting sensitive indicators. Experiments on two public threat‑detection benchmarks show that the server successfully identifies cross‑organizational campaign cohorts from fragmented local data.