FedSTGCN: a novel federated spatiotemporal graph learning-based network intrusion detection method for the Internet of Things

The rapid growth and increasing complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices have made network intrusion detection a critical challenge, especially in edge computing environments where data privacy is a primary concern. Machine learning-based intrusion detection techniques enhance IoT network security but often require centralized network data, posing significant risks to data privacy and security. Although federated learning (FL)-based network intrusion detection methods have emerged in recent years to address privacy concerns, they have not fully leveraged the advantages of graph neural networks (GNNs) for intrusion detection. To address this issue, we propose a federated spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (FedSTGCN) model, which integrates the capabilities of spatiotemporal GNNs (STGNNs) and federated learning. This framework enables collaborative model training across distributed IoT devices without requiring the sharing of raw data, thereby improving network intrusion detection accuracy while preserving data privacy. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely used IoT intrusion detection datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate that FedSTGCN outperforms other methods in both binary and multiclass classification tasks, achieving over 97% accuracy in binary classification tasks and over 92% weighted F1-score in multiclass classification tasks.