Poisoning with A Pill: Circumventing Detection in Federated Learning
Keywords: Federated Learning, Byzantine Attack, Model Poisoning
TL;DR: We propose a generic and attack-agnostic augmentation approach to enhance the effectiveness and stealthiness of existing poisoning attacks in federated learning.
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) protects data privacy by enabling distributed model training without direct access to client data. However, its distributed nature makes it vulnerable to model and data poisoning attacks. While numerous defenses filter malicious clients using statistical metrics, they overlook the role of model redundancy, where not all parameters contribute equally to the model/attack performance. Current attacks manipulate all model parameters uniformly, making them more detectable, while defenses focus on the overall statistics of client updates, leaving gaps for more sophisticated attacks. We propose an attack-agnostic augmentation method to enhance the stealthiness and effectiveness of existing poisoning attacks in FL, exposing flaws in current defenses and highlighting the need for fine-grained FL security. Our three-stage methodology—$\textit{pill construction}$, $\textit{pill poisoning}$, and $\textit{pill injection}$—injects poison into a compact subnet (i.e., pill) of the global model during the iterative FL training. Experimental results show that FL poisoning attacks enhanced by our method can bypass 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) defenses, gaining an up to 7x error rate increase, as well as on average a more than 2x error rate increase on both IID and non-IID data, in both cross-silo and cross-device FL systems.
Primary Area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
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Submission Number: 11743
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