In Federated Learning (FL), the decentralized nature of client training introduces vulnerabilities, notably backdoor attacks. Prevailing anomaly detection approaches typically perform binary classification, dividing clients into trusted and untrusted groups. However, these methods face two critical challenges: the insider threat, where malicious clients concealed within the trusted group compromise the global model, and the benign exclusion, where legitimate contributions from benign clients are mistakenly classified as untrusted and disregarded. These issues weaken both the robustness and fairness of FL systems, exposing inherent defense vulnerabilities. To address these challenges, we propose FedDLAD, a Federated Learning Dual-Layer Anomaly Detection framework designed to enhance resilience against backdoor attacks. The framework leverages the Connectivity-Based Outlier Factor (COF) module to perform a robust initial classification of clients by analyzing structural data connectivity. The Interquartile Range (IQR) module further reinforces this by mitigating the insider threat through the removal of residual malicious influences within the trusted group. Furthermore, the Pardon module dynamically reintegrates misclassified benign clients from the untrusted group, thereby preserving their valuable contributions and addressing the benign exclusion. We conduct extensive evaluations of FedDLAD against state-of-the-art defenses on real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior ability to reduce backdoor attack success rates while maintaining robust model performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/dingbinb/FedDLAD.
Ding et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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