Security and Privacy-Enhanced Federated Learning for Anomaly Detection in IoT Infrastructures

Internet of Things (IoT) anomaly detection is significant due to its fundamental roles of securing modern critical infrastructures, such as falsified data injection detection and transmission line faults diagnostic in smart grids. Researchers have proposed various detection methods fostered by machine learning (ML) techniques. Federated learning (FL), as a promising distributed ML paradigm, has been employed recently to improve detection performance due to its advantages of privacy-preserving and lower latency. However, existing FL-based methods still suffer from efficiency, robustness, and security challenges. To address these problems, in this article, we initially introduce a blockchain-empowered decentralized and asynchronous FL framework for anomaly detection in IoT systems, which ensures data integrity and prevents single-point failure while improving the efficiency. Further, we design an improved differentially private FL based on generative adversarial nets, aiming to optimize data utility throughout the training process. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first system to employ a decentralized FL approach with privacy-preserving for IoT anomaly detection. Simulation results on the real-world dataset demonstrate the superior performance from aspects of robustness, accuracy, and fast convergence while maintaining high level of privacy and security protection.