An Adaptive Communication-Efficient Federated Learning to Resist Gradient-Based Reconstruction Attacks

Abstract

The widely deployed devices in Internet of Things (IoT) have opened up a large amount of IoT data. Recently, federated learning emerges as a promising solution aiming to protect user privacy on IoT devices by training a globally shared model. However, the devices in the complex IoT environments pose great challenge to federate learning, which is vulnerable to gradient-based reconstruction attacks. In this paper, we discuss the relationships between the security of federated learning model and optimization technologies of decreasing communication overhead comprehensively. To promote the efficiency and security, we propose a defence strategy of federated learning which is suitable to resource-constrained IoT devices. The adaptive communication strategy is to adjust the frequency and parameter compression by analysing the training loss to ensure the security of the model. The experiments show the efficiency of our proposed method to decrease communication overhead, while preventing privacy data leakage.