Fast, Private, and Protected: Safeguarding Data Privacy and Defending Against Model Poisoning Attacks in Federated Learning
This addresses security and privacy issues in federated learning for distributed systems, but appears incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of protecting federated learning from model poisoning attacks while preserving data privacy, and demonstrates that their FPP approach achieves rapid convergence and can converge even with malicious participants.
Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed training paradigm wherein participants collaborate to build a global model while ensuring the privacy of the involved data, which remains stored on participant devices. However, proposals aiming to ensure such privacy also make it challenging to protect against potential attackers seeking to compromise the training outcome. In this context, we present Fast, Private, and Protected (FPP), a novel approach that aims to safeguard federated training while enabling secure aggregation to preserve data privacy. This is accomplished by evaluating rounds using participants' assessments and enabling training recovery after an attack. FPP also employs a reputation-based mechanism to mitigate the participation of attackers. We created a dockerized environment to validate the performance of FPP compared to other approaches in the literature (FedAvg, Power-of-Choice, and aggregation via Trimmed Mean and Median). Our experiments demonstrate that FPP achieves a rapid convergence rate and can converge even in the presence of malicious participants performing model poisoning attacks.