Skip to content
Open access

Federated Learning for Privacy-preserving Internet of Things (IoT) Security: A Decentralized Intrusion Detection Framework

2026 · Journal of Communications · 0 citations · 11 references

TL;DR

The proposed framework introduces several innovative features, such as federated learning with momentum-based optimization, adaptive differential privacy, trust verification via blockchain, and Byzantine-resilient aggregation, to enhance the security, scalability, and robustness of the system compared with traditional intrusion detection systems.

Abstract

—The proposed study suggests a to help cope with issues related to cybersecurity in Internet of Things and Industrial Internet of Things environments without compromising privacy. The proposed framework introduces several innovative features, such as federated learning with momentum-based optimization, adaptive differential privacy, trust verification via blockchain, and Byzantine-resilient aggregation, to enhance the security, scalability, and robustness of the system compared with traditional intrusion detection systems. It also integrates supervised classification with autoencoder-based anomaly detection to detect existing and emerging cyberattacks. The proposed system was assessed with respect to the extended Industrial Internet of Things Intrusion Dataset (X-IIoT) and Network-Based Botnet Attack detection for IoT (N-BaIoT) benchmark datasets, where the environments were simulated as federated ones. The accuracy of the Hybrid Robust Federated Intrusion Detection System increased to 97.15% on X-IIoT and 97.64% on N-BaIoT with only 41 communication rounds and was resilient against up to 20% of Byzantine clients. These results showcase its efficacy to secure, private and communication-efficient intrusion detection for next generation Internet of Things and Hybrid Robust Federated Intrusion Detection System networks. 

Read PDF

Similar papers

#federated learning Open access Aug 2026

Privacy-Enhancing Federated Learning Models for Cybersecurity in IoT Networks

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has intensified cybersecurity risks by exposing distributed connected devices to increasingly complex and pervasive threats. Conventional centralized security mechanisms often struggle to accommodate the heterogeneous and decentralized structure of IoT networks. This study investigates Federated Learning (FL) as a decentralized approach to intrusion detection that enables local model training on IoT edge devices while transmitting only encrypted model updates to a central server, thereby preserving data privacy and reducing communication overhead. A novel FL-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) architecture was developed using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for anomaly detection and the Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm for aggregating local model updates. The framework was evaluated on standard IoT datasets under non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data conditions to simulate heterogeneous real-world environments. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieved a detection accuracy of 94.6%, an F1-score of 93.8%, and a recall of 92.7%, outperforming centralized and standalone local learning methods. The framework also reduced communication overhead by 35% and achieved convergence 28% faster than conventional approaches. These findings demonstrate that FL can provide a scalable, privacy-preserving, and computationally efficient foundation for strengthening IoT cybersecurity. This study contributes a decentralized machine-learning architecture for real-time, adaptive, and privacy-conscious intrusion detection in large-scale IoT environments.

Mohammed Ajuji, Y. M. Malgwi, A. Ahmadu et al. · 0 citations
Open access Aug 2026

A Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Framework for Intrusion Detection in Healthcare IoT Environments

Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) deployments generate sensitive patient telemetry data on resource-constrained edge devices, which are prime targets for network intrusions. Centralizing raw telemetry for training intrusion detection system (IDS) models violates patient privacy and contravenes data-protection regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR. This paper proposes PPFL-IDS, a Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning framework for intrusion detection in HIoT environments. PPFL-IDS combines federated model aggregation with differential privacy noise injection and secure aggregation protocols to train a lightweight gradient-boosted ensemble IDS without exposing local device data. A heterogeneity-aware client selection mechanism addresses the challenge of non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data inherent in multi-site HIoT deployments. Evaluated on the UNSW-NB15 and a synthetic HIoT dataset spanning five attack categories, PPFL-IDS achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.938 and a mean detection latency of 20.3 ms, outperforming FedAvg, FedProx, and SCAFFOLD baselines while satisfying an ε-differential privacy budget of 1.2. Results demonstrate that strong privacy guarantees and high detection accuracy can be achieved simultaneously in federated HIoT security architectures.

Nutan Gusain, J. Alzubi · 0 citations
Conference Open access 2026

An Intelligent Intrusion Detection and Privacy-Preserving Architecture for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)

This work proposes an intelligent, lightweight Tiny LSTM–GRU hybrid IDS on the edge to monitor device-generated behavioral patterns in real time, with minimal computational and energy overhead, and proposes an adaptive FedProx-based weighted federated learning framework.

Emmanuel Udok, B. Stephen, U. Luke et al. · 0 citations
Open access Jul 2026

A Blockchain-Integrated Federated Learning Model and Autoencoder-Based Feature Reduction for Improving IoT Intrusion Detection

The study proposes a secure and adaptive intrusion detection model using Federated Learning and Blockchain, augmented with autoencoder-based feature reduction, showing that combining FL, blockchain, and deep feature extraction offers a viable and secure solution for intrusion detection systems in IoT.

Tahseen A. Wotaifi · 0 citations
Aug 2026

BELS-IoT: A Blockchain-Integrated Ensemble Learning Framework for Secure and Trustworthy IoT Device Protection

BELS-IoT is proposed, a novel decentralized protection architecture that integrates a cryptocurrency-based blockchain layer with a multi-layer ensemble learning engine that rewards honest behavior and penalizes malicious activities while maintaining privacy through federated learning with blockchain-verified reputation scores.

Anwar Kalghoum, Leila Azouz Saidane · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.