Secure Hierarchical Federated Learning for Large-Scale AI Models: Poisoning Attack Defense and Privacy Preservation in AIoT
Chengzhuo Han, Tingting Yang, Xin Sun, Zhengqi Cui · Electronics · 2025
The rapid integration of large-scale AI models into distributed systems, such as the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), has introduced critical security and privacy challenges. While configurable models enhance resource efficiency, their deployment in heterogeneous edge environments remains vulnerable to poisoning attacks, data leakage, and adversarial interference, threatening the integrity of collaborative learning and responsible AI deployment. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Hierarchical Federated Cross-domain Retrieval (FHCR) framework tailored for secure and privacy-preserving AIoT systems. By decoupling models into a shared retrieval layer (globally optimized via federated learning) and device-specific layers (locally personalized), FHCR minimizes communication overhead while enabling dynamic module selection. Crucially, we integrate a retrieval-layer mean inspection (RLMI) mechanism to detect and filter malicious gradient updates, effectively mitigating poisoning attacks and reducing attack success rates by 20% compared to conventional methods. Extensive evaluation on General-QA and IoT-Native datasets demonstrates the robustness of FHCR against adversarial threats, with FHCR maintaining global accuracy not lower than baseline levels while reducing communication costs by 14%.