Toward Efficient and Robust Federated Unlearning in IoT Networks

Owing to its practical configuration to edge computing and privacy preservation capabilities, federated learning (FL) has been increasingly appealing in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, due to the inherent openness of IoT network architectures, FL clients are susceptible to various attacks, resulting in unreliable local model updates. To address this challenge, federated unlearning (FU) emerges as a viable solution, which can erase such unreliable updates from the FL model using the unlearning operation while preserving model accuracy. Existing FU studies have significant potential, but they are not directly applicable to IoT networks because of their high computational costs and limited capacity to defend against prevalent dynamic attacks in mobile network environments. In this work, we propose FedRemover, a novel FU method specifically tailored for deployment in IoT networks. The key insight behind FedRemover is that model updates will exhibit inconsistency when exposed to attacks. Therefore, we devise a real-time malicious client detection scheme by examining the performance consistency of model updates. Upon detecting malicious clients, FedRemover promptly executes the unlearning operation, achieving an unlearned global model within a minimal number of rounds. This makes FedRemover highly efficient and robust against dynamic attacks, enabling it well-suited for practical deployment in IoT networks. Experiments on three standard datasets demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of FedRemover, with an obvious speed-up of 10× and comparable robustness guarantees compared with benchmark algorithms.