Optimising Intrusion Detection Systems in Cloud-Edge Continuum with Knowledge Distillation for Privacy-Preserving and Efficient Communication

The growth of the Internet of Things has amplified the need for secure data interactions in cloud-edge ecosystems, where sensitive information is constantly processed across various system layers. Intrusion detection systems are commonly used to protect such environments from malicious attacks. Recently, Federated Learning has emerged as an effective solution for implementing intrusion detection systems, owing to its decentralised architecture that avoids sharing raw data with a central server, thereby enhancing data privacy. Despite its benefits, Federated Learning faces criticism for high communication overhead from frequent model updates, especially in large-scale Cloud-Edge infrastructures. This paper explores Knowledge Distillation to reduce communication overhead in Cloud-Edge intrusion detection while preserving accuracy and data privacy. Experiments show significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.