AEFL: Anonymous and Efficient Federated Learning in Vehicle–Road Cooperation Systems With Augmented Intelligence of Things

As the Augmented Intelligence of Things (AIoT) advances within vehicle-road coordination systems, challenges related to road traffic data transmission and processing are being increasingly addressed. However, this progress also brings significant risks of privacy data leakage. Federated learning (FL), a distributed machine learning paradigm, effectively safeguards client data privacy by allowing multiple participants to collaboratively train models while keeping their data localized. Despite its benefits, FL faces challenges, such as model parameter leakage and Byzantine attacks. To tackle these issues, this article introduces an anonymous and efficient FL framework for vehicle-road coordination systems (AEFL), designed to ensure a secure and reliable vehicle data transmission process. This architecture incorporates a novel group pairing onion routing protocol, which leverages pairing cryptography principles for hierarchical data encryption. During the routing process, relay group nodes decrypt the corresponding layer, ensuring both data confidentiality and node anonymity. Additionally, a sampling method is proposed to accurately identify Byzantine vehicle nodes, enhancing the precision of FL aggregation without compromising overall model performance. Experimental results show that AEFL outperforms the classic TOR anonymous routing protocol, achieving a 100% message delivery rate more quickly. Under the same conditions, the anonymity of the source node and the destination node improves by 3.9% and 1.9%, respectively. When half of the nodes are compromised, path anonymity can be increased by 24.8%. Furthermore, our framework excels in FL aggregation efficiency, with a Byzantine adversary detection accuracy of up to 99%.