An Efficient Federated Learning Framework for IoT Intrusion Detection

The exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems has raised significant cybersecurity concerns. Deep learning (DL)-based methods have shown promising performance in detecting potential cyber threats in IoT networks. However, as these methods often involve data centralization, they can pose serious data privacy issues for IoT users and increase the communication burden of local networks. Federated learning (FL), as a distributed learning paradigm, enables privacy-preserving training of IoT intrusion detection models by requiring only model updates from IoT devices. However, the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices can significantly decrease FL training efficiencies, such as increased training latency and delayed convergence speed. Moreover, the data heterogeneous issues of IoT devices can also impact the accuracy and robustness of the trained model. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient FL framework, FedKD-Prox, based on federated proximal (FedProx) and knowledge distillation (KD). To improve the prediction accuracy within a limited time budget, the proposed framework aims to efficiently exploit the computation capability of the IoT trainers, reduce the communication overhead of FL, and alleviate the impact of heterogeneous data issues. The simulation results show that FedKD-Prox achieves higher accuracy and improves the robustness of the trained intrusion detection model.