Blockchain-Inspired Collaborative Cyber-Attacks Detection for Securing Metaverse

The heterogeneous connections in metaverse environments pose vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks. To prevent and mitigate malicious network activities in a distributed metaverse, conventional intrusion detection systems (IDS) have communication overhead and privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL) techniques are widely employed to develop IDS frameworks and enable privacy-preserving collaborative learning schemes in decentralized ecosystems. However, the vanilla FL system utilizes a centralized FL aggregation technique, which introduces a single point of failure (SPoF) and potential unauthorized aggregators, allowing malicious clients to inject false data parameters, known as poisoning attacks. Furthermore, low-quality clients in the FL system can result in degraded model performance and hinder convergence. This study proposes a secure and reliable blockchain-aided federated learning (BFL)-based IDS framework using a lightweight model for securing metaverse. An authorized federated IDS is proposed to establish a trustworthy decentralized aggregation mechanism, utilizing Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus. The proposed federated IDS implemented a hybrid client selection (HCS) technique, considering the accuracy and reputation of client histories, to select high-quality metaverse edge devices. Additionally, a fairness ERC-20 token-based incentive mechanism was developed to reward selected FL clients as a token of appreciation for their contribution to the FL training processes. According to the IDS framework measurements, the proposed model performs better than the existing approaches for detecting cyber-attacks in metaverse environments, achieving an accuracy of 99.28% with trainable parameters of 1.8K and mega floating-point operations (MFLOPs) of 0.0016.