Privacy and Security in Federated Learning: A Survey

Abstract

In recent years, privacy concerns have become a serious issue for companies wishing to protect economic models and comply with end-user expectations. In the same vein, some countries now impose, by law, constraints on data use and protection. Such context thus encourages machine learning to evolve from a centralized data and computation approach to decentralized approaches. Specifically, Federated Learning (FL) has been recently developed as a solution to improve privacy, relying on local data to train local models, which collaborate to update a global model that improves generalization behaviors. However, by definition, no computer system is entirely safe. Security issues, such as data poisoning and adversarial attack, can introduce bias in the model predictions. In addition, it has recently been shown that the reconstruction of private raw data is still possible. This paper presents a comprehensive study concerning various privacy and security issues related to federated learning. Then, we identify the state-of-the-art approaches that aim to counteract these problems. Findings from our study confirm that the current major security threats are poisoning, backdoor, and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based attacks, while inference-based attacks are the most critical to the privacy of FL. Finally, we identify ongoing research directions on the topic. This paper could be used as a reference to promote cybersecurity-related research on designing FL-based solutions for alleviating future challenges.