Systematic Analysis of Label-flipping Attacks against Federated Learning in Collaborative Intrusion Detection Systems
Léo Lavaur, Yann Busnel, Fabien Autrel · 2024
With the emergence of federated learning (FL) and its promise of privacy-preserving knowledge sharing, the field of intrusion detection systems (IDSs) has seen a renewed interest in the development of collaborative models. However, the distributed nature of FL makes it vulnerable to malicious contributions from its participants, including data poisoning attacks. The specific case of label-flipping attacks, where the labels of a subset of the training data are flipped, has been overlooked in the context of IDSs that leverage FL primitives. This study aims to close this gap by providing a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the impact of label-flipping attacks on FL for IDSs. We show that such attacks can still have a significant impact on the performance of FL models, especially targeted ones, depending on parameters and dataset characteristics. Additionally, the provided tools and methodology can be used to extend our findings to other models and datasets, and benchmark the efficiency of existing countermeasures.