R-FLHE: Robust Federated Learning Framework Against Untargeted Model Poisoning Attacks in Hierarchical Edge Computing

Jeehu Kim, Jaewoo Lee

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2023.50.1.94

Federated learning is a server-client based distributed learning strategy that collects only trained model to guarantee data privacy and reduce communication costs. Recently, research is being conducted to prepare for the future IoT ecosystem by combining edge computing and federated learning. However, research considering vulnerabilities and threat is insufficient. In this paper, we propose Robust Federated Learning in Hierarchical Edge computing (R-FLHE), a federated learning framework for robust global model from untargeted model poisoning attacks. R-FLHE can aggregate models learned from clients, evaluate them on the edge server, and score them based on the calculated model’s loss. R-FLHE can maintain robustness of the global model by sending only the model of the edge server with the best score to the cloud server. The R-FLHE proposed in this paper shows robustness in maintaining constant performance for each federated learning round, with performance drop of only 0.81% and 1.88% on average even if attacks occur.