Towards Attack-tolerant Federated Learning via Critical Parameter
  Analysis
Sungwon Han Sungwon Park Fangzhao Wu Sundong Kim Bin Zhu Xing Xie Meeyoung Cha
Federated learning is used to train a shared model in a decentralized way
without clients sharing private data with each other. Federated learning
systems are susceptible to poisoning attacks when malicious clients send false
updates to the central server. Existing defense strategies are ineffective
under non-IID data settings. This paper proposes a new defense strategy, FedCPA
(Federated learning with Critical Parameter Analysis). Our attack-tolerant
aggregation method is based on the observation that benign local models have
similar sets of top-k and bottom-k critical parameters, whereas poisoned local
models do not. Experiments with different attack scenarios on multiple datasets
demonstrate that our model outperforms existing defense strategies in defending
against poisoning attacks.