Cross-Layer Federated Learning for Lightweight IoT Intrusion Detection Systems

With the proliferation of IoT devices, ensuring the security and privacy of these devices and their associated data has become a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose a federated sampling and lightweight intrusion-detection system for IoT networks that use K-meansfor sampling network traffic and identifying anomalies in a semi-supervised way. The system is designed to preserve data privacy by performing local clustering on each device and sharing only summary statistics with a central aggregator. The proposed system is particularly suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices such as sensors with limited computational and storage capabilities. We evaluate the system’s performance using the publicly available NSL-KDD dataset. Our experiments and simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed intrusion-detection system, highlighting the trade-offs between precision and recall when sharing statistics between workers and the coordinator. Notably, our experiments show that the proposed federated IDS can increase the true-positive rate up to 10% when the workers and the coordinator collaborate.