Mitigating Data Poisoning Attacks On a Federated Learning-Edge Computing Network

Edge Computing (EC) has seen a continuous rise in its popularity as it provides a solution to the latency and communication issues associated with edge devices transferring data to remote servers. EC achieves this by bringing the cloud closer to edge devices. Even though EC does an excellent job of solving the latency and communication issues, it does not solve the privacy issues associated with users transferring personal data to the nearby edge server. Federated Learning (FL) is an approach that was introduced to solve the privacy issues associated with data transfers to distant servers. FL attempts to resolve this issue by bringing the code to the data, which goes against the traditional way of sending the data to remote servers. In FL, the data stays on the source device, and a Machine Learning (ML) model used to train the local data is brought to the end device instead. End devices train the ML model using local data and then send the model updates back to the server for aggregation. However, this process of asking random devices to train a model using its local data has potential risks such as a participant poisoning the model using malicious data for training to produce bogus parameters. In this paper, an approach to mitigate data poisoning attacks in a federated learning setting is investigated. The application of the approach is highlighted, and the practical and secure nature of this approach is illustrated as well using numerical results.