Efficient detection of Byzantine attacks in federated learning using last layer biases

Federated learning (FL) is an alternative to centralized machine learning (ML) that builds a model across multiple decentralized edge devices (a.k.a. workers) that own the training data. This has two advantages: i) the data used for training are not uploaded to the server and ii) the server can distribute the training load across the workers instead of using its own resources. However, due to the distributed nature of FL, the server has no control over the behaviours of the workers. Malicious workers can, therefore, orchestrate different kinds of attacks against FL. Byzantine attacks are amongst the most common and straight forward attacks on FL. They try to prevent FL models from converging by uploading random updates. Several techniques have been proposed to detect such kind of attacks, but they usually entail a high cost for the server. This hampers one of the main benefits of FL, which is load reduction. In this work, we propose a highly efficient approach to detect workers that try to perform Byzantine FL attacks. In particular, we analyze the last layer biases of deep learning (DL) models on the server-side to detect malicious workers. We evaluate our approach with two deep learning models on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 data sets. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms current methods in runtime while providing similar attack detection accuracy.

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Additional Info
Field Value
Author Jebreel, Najeeb
Author Blanco-Justicia, Alberto
Author Sánchez, David
Author Domingo-Ferrer, Josep josep.domingo@urv.cat
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57524-3_13
Group Select Group
Publisher Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 12256 (Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence-MDAI 2020 )
Source International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence MDAI 2020: Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence pp 154-165
Thematic Cluster Privacy Enhancing Technology [PET]
system:type ConferencePaper
Management Info
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Author Wright Joanna
Maintainer Jesus Manjon
Version 1
Last Updated 5 March 2021, 12:36 (CET)
Created 10 February 2021, 15:54 (CET)