Robust Federated Learning against Poisoning Attacks using Capsule Neural
Networks
Abstract
The expansion of machine learning applications across dif- ferent
domains has given rise to a growing interest in tap- ping into the vast
reserves of data that are being generated by edge devices. To preserve
data privacy, federated learn- ing was developed as a collaboratively
decentralized privacy- preserving technology to overcome the challenges
of data silos and data sensibility. This technology faces certain lim-
itations due to the limited network connectivity of mobile devices and
malicious attackers. In addition, data samples across all devices are
typically not independent and iden- tically distributed (non-IID), which
presents additional chal- lenges to achieving convergence in fewer
communication rounds. In this paper, we have simulated attacks, namely
Byzantine, label flipping, and noisy data attacks, besides non-IID data.
We proposed Robust federated learning against poisoning attacks (RFCaps)
to increase safety and accelerate conver- gence. RFCaps incorporates a
prediction-based clustering and a gradient quality evaluation method to
prevent attack- ers from the aggregation phase by applying multiple
filters and also accelerate convergence by using the highest quality
gradients. In comparison to MKRUM, COMED, TMean, and FedAvg algorithms,
RFCap has high robustness in the pres- ence of attackers and has
achieved a higher accuracy of up to 80% on both MNIST and Fashion-MNIST
datasets.