Toward Accurate Anomaly Detection in Industrial Internet of Things Using Hierarchical Federated Learning

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an emerging technology that can promote the development of industrial intelligence, improve production efficiency, and reduce manufacturing costs. However, anomalies of IIoT devices might expose sensitive data about users of high authenticity and validity, resulting in security and privacy threats to the IIoT applications. That suggests the significance of anomaly detection executed by proper authorities. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a reliable anomaly detection strategy for IIoT using federated learning. Specifically, we apply the federated learning technique to build a universal anomaly detection model with each local model trained by the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm. Since local data sets are not required during the federated learning, the chance of privacy leakage is reduced. In addition, by introducing privacy leakage degree and action relation to anomaly detection design, we can greatly improve the detection accuracy. The validation experiments indicate that the proposed strategy achieves high throughput, low latency, and high anomaly detection accuracy for privacy preservation in various IIoT scenarios.