DAM-SE: A Blockchain-Based Optimized Solution for the Counterattacks in the Internet of Federated Learning Systems

The rapid development in network technology has resulted in the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT). This trend has led to a widespread utilization of decentralized data and distributed computing power. While machine learning can benefit from the massive amount of IoT data, privacy concerns and communication costs have caused data silos. Although the adoption of blockchain and federated learning technologies addresses the security issues related to collusion attacks and privacy leakage in data sharing, the “free-rider attacks” and “model poisoning attacks” in the federated learning process require auditing of the training models one by one. However, that increases the communication cost of the entire training process. Hence, to address the problem of increased communication cost due to node security verification in the blockchain-based federated learning process, we propose a communication cost optimization method based on security evaluation. By studying the verification mechanism for useless or malicious nodes, we also introduce a double-layer aggregation model into the federated learning process by combining the competing voting verification methods and aggregation algorithms. The experimental comparisons verify that the proposed model effectively reduces the communication cost of the node security verification in the blockchain-based federated learning process.