Byzantines can also learn from history: fall of centered clipping in federated learning
File(s)OOKG_TIFS24.pdf (680.68 KB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Özfatura, Kerem
Özfatura, Emre
Küpçü, Alptekin
Gunduz, Deniz
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The increasing popularity of the federated learning (FL) framework due to its success in a wide range of collaborative learning tasks also induces certain security concerns. Among many vulnerabilities, the risk of Byzantine attacks is of particular concern, which refers to the possibility of malicious clients participating in the learning process. Hence, a crucial objective in FL is to neutralize the potential impact of Byzantine attacks and to ensure that the final model is trustable. It has been observed that the higher the variance among the clients’ models/updates, the more space there is for Byzantine attacks to be hidden. As a consequence, by utilizing momentum, and thus, reducing the variance, it is possible to weaken the strength of known Byzantine attacks. The centered clipping (CC) framework has further shown that the momentum term from the previous iteration, besides reducing the variance, can be used as a reference point to neutralize Byzantine attacks better. In this work, we first expose vulnerabilities of the CC framework, and introduce a novel attack strategy that can circumvent the defences of CC and other robust aggregators and reduce their test accuracy up to %33 on best-case scenarios in image classification tasks. Then, we propose a new robust and fast defence mechanism that is effective against the proposed and other existing Byzantine attacks.
Date Issued
2024
Date Acceptance
2023-10-26
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2024, 19, pp.2010-2022
ISSN
1556-6013
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
2010
End Page
2022
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Volume
19
Copyright Statement
© 2023 IEEE. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a Creative
Commons Attribution (CCBY) license to any Author Accepted Manuscript
version arising from this submission.
Commons Attribution (CCBY) license to any Author Accepted Manuscript
version arising from this submission.
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/tifs.2023.3345171
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2023-12-19