A Critical Evaluation of Privacy and Security Threats in Federated Learning

Abstract

With the advent of smart devices, smartphones, and smart everything, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged with an incredible impact on the industries and human life. The IoT consists of millions of clients that exchange massive amounts of critical data, which results in high privacy risks when processed by a centralized cloud server. Motivated by this privacy concern, a new machine learning paradigm has emerged, namely Federated Learning (FL). Specifically, FL allows for each client to train a learning model locally and performs global model aggregation at the centralized cloud server in order to avoid the direct data leakage from clients. However, despite this efficient distributed training technique, an individual’s private information can still be compromised. To this end, in this paper, we investigate the privacy and security threats that can harm the whole execution process of FL. Additionally, we provide practical solutions to overcome those attacks and protect the individual’s privacy. We also present experimental results in order to highlight the discussed issues and possible solutions. We expect that this work will open exciting perspectives for future research in FL.