Virat Shejwalkar (UMass Amherst), Amir Houmansadr (UMass Amherst)

Federated learning (FL) enables many data owners (e.g., mobile devices) to train a joint ML model (e.g., a next-word prediction classifier) without the need of sharing their private training data.

However, FL is known to be susceptible to poisoning attacks by malicious participants (e.g., adversary-owned mobile devices) who aim at hampering the accuracy of the jointly trained model through sending malicious inputs during the federated training process.

In this paper, we present a generic framework for model poisoning attacks on FL. We show that our framework leads to poisoning attacks that substantially outperform state-of-the-art model poisoning attacks by large margins. For instance, our attacks result in $1.5times$ to $60times$ higher reductions in the accuracy of FL models compared to previously discovered poisoning attacks.

Our work demonstrates that existing Byzantine-robust FL algorithms are significantly more susceptible to model poisoning than previously thought. Motivated by this, we design a defense against FL poisoning, called emph{divide-and-conquer} (DnC). We demonstrate that DnC outperforms all existing Byzantine-robust FL algorithms in defeating model poisoning attacks,
specifically, it is $2.5times$ to $12times$ more resilient in our experiments with different datasets and models.

View More Papers

Hashomer – Privacy-Preserving Bluetooth Based Contact Tracing Scheme for...

Benny Pinkas (Bar-Ilan University); Eyal Ronen (Tel Aviv University)

Read More

Demo #5: Securing Heavy Vehicle Diagnostics

Jeremy Daily, David Nnaji, and Ben Ettlinger (Colorado State University)

Read More

Digital Technologies in Pandemic: The Good, the Bad and...

Moderator: Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, TU Darmstadt, Germany Panelists: Mario Guglielmetti, Legal Officer, European Data Protection Supervisor* Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Radbaud University, The Netherlands Alexandra Dmitrienko, University of Würzburg, Germany, Farinaz Koushanfar, UCSD, USA *attending in his personal capacity

Read More