A Novel Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning Scheme for IoT Anomaly Detection

In this research, we proposed a novel anomaly detection system (ADS) that integrates federated learning (FL) with blockchain for resource-constrained IoT. The proposed system allows IoT devices to exchange machine learning (ML) models through a permissioned blockchain, enabling trustworthy collaborative learning through model sharing. To avoid single-point failure, any device can be a centre of the FL process. To deal with the issue of resource constraints in IoT devices and the model poisoning problem in FL, we introduced a novel method to use commitment coefficients and ML model discrepancies when selecting particular devices to join the FL process. We also proposed an efficient heuristic method to aggregate a federated model from a list of ML models trained locally on the selected devices, which helps to improve the federated model’s anomaly detection ability. The experiment results with the popular N-BaIoT dataset for IoT botnet attack detection show that the proposed system is more effective in detecting anomalies and resisting poisoning attacks than the two baselines (FedProx and FedAvg).