Cited by 310Privacy-Preserving Technologies in DataAdversarial Robustness in Machine LearningNetwork Security and Intrusion Detection

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 38 of the 38 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 16 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Data Poisoning Attacks on Federated Machine Learning

Open access
Sun, Gan, Cong, Yang, Dong, Jiahua, Wang, Qiang, Lyu, Lingjuan, Liu, Ji·2022·IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Abstract

Federated machine learning which enables resource-constrained node devices (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) devices and smartphones) to establish a knowledge-shared model while keeping the raw data local, could provide privacy preservation, and economic benefit by designing an effective communication protocol. However, this communication protocol can be adopted by attackers to launch data poisoning attacks for different nodes, which has been shown as a big threat to most machine learning models. Therefore, we in this article intend to study the model vulnerability of federated machine learning, and even on IoT systems. To be specific, we here attempt to attacking a popular federated multitask learning framework, which uses a general multitask learning framework to handle statistical challenges in the federated learning setting. The problem of calculating optimal poisoning attacks on federated multitask learning is formulated as a bilevel program, which is adaptive to the arbitrary selection oftargetnodes andsource attackingnodes. We then propose a novel systems-aware optimization method, called as attack on federated learning (AT2FL), to efficiently derive the implicit gradients for poisoned data, and further attain optimal attack strategies in the federated machine learning. This is an earlier work, to our knowledge, that explores attacking federated machine learning via data poisoning. Finally, experiments on several real-world data sets demonstrate that when the attackers directly poison thetargetnodes or indirectly poison the related nodes via using the communication protocol, the federated multitask learning model is sensitive to both poisoning attacks.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This paper studies data poisoning attacks on federated machine learning, focusing on a federated multi-task learning framework. It formulates optimal attacks as a bilevel program and proposes AT²FL to compute poisoned data that degrades target-node performance, including indirect attacks via the communication protocol.

Key findings

  • Direct attacks substantially degrade performance: on EndAD and Human Activity, classification Error deteriorates by 21.707% and 26.836%, respectively, compared with non-attack baselines.
  • The proposed attack strategies outperform random attacks in most cases, e.g., direct attack Error on EndAD is 28.588 ± 3.74 vs. random direct 7.659 ± 1.14; on Human Activity, 29.422 ± 2.96 vs. random direct 3.275 ± 0.71.
  • Indirect attacks are generally weaker than direct and hybrid attacks, but can work when node correlations are high; the paper reports Landmine indirect attack Error of 7.428 ± 0.39 vs. non-attack 5.682 ± 0.28, and attributes this to high correlation in its Ω matrix.
  • Attack effectiveness increases with the ratio of injected data, and AT²FL converges to a local optimum after a few iterations across the tested attack types.

Methods

  • The paper formulates poisoning attacks on federated multi-task learning as a bilevel optimization problem, with upper-level poisoned data and lower-level federated multi-task learning, covering direct, indirect, and hybrid attacks.
  • It proposes ATTack on Federated Learning (AT²FL), a projected stochastic gradient ascent method that computes implicit gradients for poisoned data using dual variables for least-square and hinge losses.
  • Experiments use five datasets: EndAD (6 nodes), Human Activity Recognition (30 nodes), Landmine (29 nodes), Parkinson-Total, and Parkinson-Motor (42 regression tasks each); metrics are classification Error and RMSE, averaged over 10 random runs, with injected data set to 20% of clean data and step size η₁ = 100, λ₁ = λ₂ = 0.001.

Limitations

  • The paper does not state limitations explicitly; it notes future work on vertical (feature-based) federated learning and federated transfer learning.
  • Evident from the text: the study is limited to horizontal federated multi-task learning and does not evaluate defenses or other federated learning settings.
  • Evident from the text: the attack assumes the attacker can inject poisoned data into source nodes and exploit the communication protocol, and the empirical evaluation is limited to the selected datasets and tasks.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/jiot.2021.3128646

Cites

38 of 38 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

17 Own interpretation · 11 Not checked yet · 11 No basis given · 10 Own result

Verify all 16 references — free account

Show all 31 claims

  • It may state two separate claims as one. 10
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 1
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 12
18 of 18
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The attempt to make federated learning more reliable under poisoning attacks is still scarce.

    “Although recent improvements have been focusing on overcoming the statistical challenges ( i.e., the data collected across the network are in a non-IID manner, where the data on each node are generated by a distinct distribution) or improving privacypreserving, the attempt that makes federated learning more reliability under poisoning attacks, is still scarce.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Current optimization methods for the bilevel problem are not suited to tackle systems challenges that exist in federated learning, such as high communication cost and stragglers.

    “However, current optimization methods for this bilevel problem are not suited to tackle the systems challenges ( e.g., high communication cost, stragglers) that exist in federated learning.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The attacker aims to degrade the performance of a set of target nodes by injecting corrupted/poisoned data to a set of source attacking nodes.

    “Suppose that the attacker aims to degrade the performance of a set of target nodes N tar ⊂ m by injecting corrupted/poisoned data to a set of source attacking nodes N sou ⊂ m .”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The communication protocol in federated learning is bridged by the model relationship matrix Ω.

    “where the communication protocol is bridged by the model relationship matrix Ω in this paper.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The benchmark datasets used are representative of real-world applications.

    “Extensive experiments demonstrate that the attack strategies computed by AT 2 FL can significantly damage performances of real-world applications.”
5 of 5

Claims other papers make about this one

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Self-check

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2 of 2

Citations

Cites

Show all 37 references

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Caldas, Federated kernelized multi-task learning, 1

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Items 301–310 of 310

Metadata

Authors
Sun, G., Cong, Y., Dong, J., Wang, Q., Lyu, L., & Liu, J.
Affiliations
  • Shenyang Institute of Automation (CN)
  • Sony (Japan) (JP)
  • Kuaishou (China) (CN)
Venue
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Published
2022-07-01
Volume
9
Issue
13
Pages
11365-11375
ISSN
  • 2327-4662 (ISSN-L)
  • 2372-2541
OpenAlex
W3213330817
Cited by
310
References
37
Citations by year
2026: 43 · 2025: 79 · 2024: 78 · 2023: 64 · 2022: 32
FWCI
16.19
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Internet of Things Journal (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62003336, 62073205)
  • National Postdoctoral Innovative Talents Support Program (BX20200353)
  • State Key Laboratory of Robotics (2022-Z06)
  • Nature Foundation of Liaoning Province of China (2020-KF-11-01)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Network Security and Intrusion Detection
Keywords
data poisoning, federated learning, bi-level optimization, Internet of Things security, privacy preservation, model vulnerability

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