Recent Advances on Federated Learning for Cybersecurity and Cybersecurity for Federated Learning for Internet of Things

Abstract

Decentralized paradigm in the field of cybersecurity and machine learning (ML) for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a lot of attention from the government, academia, and industries in recent years. Federated cybersecurity (FC) is regarded as a revolutionary concept to make the IoT safer and more efficient in the future. This emerging concept has the potential of detecting security threats, taking countermeasures, and limiting the spreading of threats over the IoT network system efficiently. An objective of cybersecurity is achieved by forming the federation of the learned and shared model on top of various participants. Federated learning (FL), which is regarded as a privacy-aware ML model, is particularly useful to secure the vulnerable IoT environment. In this article, we start with background and comparison of centralized learning, distributed on-site learning, and FL, which is then followed by a survey of the application of FL to cybersecurity for IoT. This survey primarily focuses on the security aspect but it also discusses several approaches that address the performance issues (e.g., accuracy, latency, resource constraint, and others) associated with FL, which may impact the security and overall performance of the IoT. To anticipate the future evolution of this new paradigm, we discuss the main ongoing research efforts, challenges, and research trends in this area. With this article, readers can have a more thorough understanding of FL for cybersecurity as well as cybersecurity for FL, different security attacks, and countermeasures.