Security of Federated Learning: Attacks, Defensive Mechanisms, and Challenges
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) paradigm, known as Federated Learning (FL), has been introduced. It is a decentralized approach to apply Machine Learning (ML) on-device without risking the disclosure and tracing of sensitive and private information. Instead of training the global model on a centralized server (by aggregating the clients’ private data), FL trains a global shared model by only aggregating clients’ locally-computed updates (the clients’ private data remains distributed across the clients’ devices). However, as secure as the FL seems, it by itself does not give the levels of privacy and security required by today’s distributed systems. This paper seeks to provide a holistic view of FL’s security concerns. We outline the most important attacks and vulnerabilities that are highly relevant to FL systems. Then, we present the recent proposed defensive mechanisms. Finally, we highlight the outstanding challenges, and we discuss the possible future research directions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".