arXiv Machine Learning

WaSA: Wavelet Scattering Autoencoders for Unsupervised Offline Detection of Malicious Clients in Federated Learning

WaSA is a fully unsupervised, offline framework that detects malicious clients in federated learning by having each client send a single privacy‑preserving spectral summary before training. A denoising autoencoder, trained only on clean data, scores clients based on deviation from a learned benign manifold, enabling detection of any attack type without prior labels. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR‑10, and CIFAR‑100 with up to 90 % malicious clients show consistent improvements over supervised baselines and robust aggregation methods, with negligible communication overhead.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

FedNIA: Noise-Induced Activation Analysis for Mitigating Data Poisoning in Federated Learning

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.

By Ehsan Hallaji, Roozbeh Razavi-Far, Mehrdad Saif
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

F-ACVAE: A Federated Adaptive Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder for Privacy-Preserving Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks

The rapid proliferation of Internet of things (IoT) devices has significantly expanded the cyber-attack surface, necessitating robust and privacy-preserving intrusion detection systems (IDS). However, centralized learning approaches often suffer from severe performance degradation due to high-dimensional traffic data, extreme class imbalance, and highly non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data across heterogeneous edge devices.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

F-ACVAE: A Federated Adaptive Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder for Privacy-Preserving Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks

arXiv:2607. 04698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid proliferation of Internet of things (IoT) devices has significantly expanded the cyber-attack surface, necessitating robust and privacy-preserving intrusion detection systems (IDS).

By Mohammad Ansarimehr, Somayeh Changiz, Ehsan Baghishani, Ali Mousavi
arXiv AI
Aug 6

FBID: Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning for Robust Out-of-Distribution Attack Detection in IoT Networks

arXiv:2608. 04073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has emerged as a promising solution for intrusion detection in heterogeneous IoT environments, as it can improve local adaptation under highly Non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) data distributions.

By An Khanh Bui, Cong Thanh Nguyen, Hoang-Anh Pham, Hoang Thai Dinh, Diep N. Nguyen
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Backdoors Leave Structural Traces: FedMAST for Backdoor Detection and Containment in Federated Learning

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.

By Srinivasan Subramanian, Kazi Aminul Islam, Md. Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan
arXiv AI
Sep 24

When Clients Are Orchestrated: Strategic Gradient Manipulation to Defeat Federated Learning Servers with Efficient Defense

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.

By Mohamed Shaaban, Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

Compression Footprints as Security Signals for Model-Poisoning Defense in Federated Learning

The paper proposes using lossy compression as a security signal in federated learning by defining a "compression footprint"—a low‑dimensional set of statistics derived from the compressor’s output. It introduces CRAFT, a server‑side aggregation method that leverages these footprints to distinguish honest from malicious updates without extra client metadata or knowledge of attacker numbers. Experiments on six attacks and datasets show CRAFT often outperforms existing robust aggregation baselines, demonstrating that compression can simultaneously reduce communication and enhance security.

By Sachi Shome, William Eiers