The paper investigates how adversarial examples transfer between client models in federated learning and explores the relationship between these examples and client data distributions. It proposes a defense strategy based on adversarial training that leverages the transferability of model robustness. Experiments on real-life datasets demonstrate that the new attack and defense methods outperform existing state‑of‑the‑art approaches.
By Zuobin Xiong, Deval Mukherjee, Homook Cho, Wei Li
arXiv:2608. 01095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple intelligent devices to collaboratively train a high-accuracy model without sharing raw data.
By Hongliang Zhang, Zhongyuan Yu, Fenghua Xu, Teng Hu, Jian Meng, Jiguo Yu
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...
By Mouhamed Amine Bouchiha, Gregory Blanc, Yufei Han
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
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
The development of federated learning (FL) techniques has helped improve the privacy preservation of users' data and extended the applications of machine learning models. However, the involvement of a...
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.
By Kai Li, Jong-Ik Park, Carlee Joe-Wong, Wei Ni, Falko Dressler
The paper investigates the effects of label‑flipping poisoning attacks in a three‑client federated intrusion detection system (IDS) trained on CICIDS2017 with non‑IID attack subtype distributions. Flipping 60% of training labels from a single Byzantine client reduces the attacker’s own detection accuracy from 99.96% to 84.33%, while the federated global ensemble remains stable across all tested poison rates. The study shows that the self‑compromise signal can be detected as an anomaly, enabling Byzantine client identification without target data exfiltration, and notes that the current aggregation uses a Federated Forest rather than FedAvg, with future work planned to extend to parametric classifiers.
By Asmah Muallem, Firdous Kausar, Sajid Hussain, Lei Qian
The paper investigates how privacy guarantees, robustness to Byzantine attacks, and detection coverage for rare intrusion types interact in federated network intrusion detection systems. It introduces geometric indistinguishability to explain how privacy noise can obscure minority-class signals, and demonstrates through experiments on UNSW‑NB15 that combining differential privacy with robust aggregation can disproportionately harm detection of rare attacks. The study highlights that these properties cannot be treated as independently composable and calls for aggregation‑aware modeling and sample‑aware evaluation to build trustworthy federated NIDS.
By Adrita Rahman Tory, ABM Shawkat Ali, Md Abu Layek, Khondokar Fida Hasan
arXiv:2606. 17035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior research suggests that differential privacy (DP) inherently enhances the robustness of federated learning (FL) against backdoor attacks.
By Xiaolin Li, Ning Wang, Ninghui Li, Wenhai Sun
The paper investigates how the strategic placement of Byzantine nodes in decentralized federated learning (DFL) affects the propagation of malicious influence across the communication graph. It introduces Byzantine Placement Influence (BPI), a measure that captures cumulative exposure of honest nodes to Byzantine sources over time, and develops algorithms to optimize BPI across various network structures and attack types. Experiments demonstrate that BPI-guided placements consistently yield highly damaging configurations, highlighting the importance of considering node placement in DFL threat models.
By Edoardo Gabrielli, Gabriele Tolomei
arXiv:2607. 26933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is vulnerable to backdoor attacks because of its distributed nature in edge computing scenarios.
By Hongliang Zhang, Zhongyuan Yu, Guijuan Wang, Tianqing He, Wenshuo Ma, Xiaosong Zhang, Jiguo Yu