Generative AI and Federated Learning for Intrusion Detection Systems: A Survey

Abstract

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are essential for monitoring network traffic and identifying malicious activities in modern cyber-physical, Internet of Things (IoT), enterprise, and distributed network environments. However, developing reliable IDS models remains challenging because attack behaviors evolve over time, realistic datasets are difficult to obtain, traffic records may be incomplete, attack classes are often imbalanced, and privacy constraints limit centralized data collection. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and Federated Learning (FL) provide new opportunities to address these limitations. Generative models can support anomaly detection, synthetic traffic generation, data augmentation, data imputation, adversarial traffic generation, and IDS alert explanation. FL enables distributed IDS training without directly sharing local network traffic, making it suitable for privacy-sensitive and geographically distributed environments. This survey provides a structured review of generative AI and FL techniques for IDS. We first summarize representative IDS research directions, including adversarial machine learning, anomaly-based detection, IoT-oriented IDS, explainable IDS, and benchmark datasets. We then categorize generative AI applications in IDS according to model families and task objectives, covering autoencoder-based models, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion models, and Large Language Models (LLMs). Finally, we review emerging studies that integrate generative AI with FL-based IDS and discuss open challenges, including synthetic data quality, realistic traffic generation, dual-use adversarial risks, non-IID client distributions, communication-efficient model sharing, federated IDS benchmarking, and domain-specific LLMs for network security.