Robust and Lightweight Federated Learning for NB-IoT Security: A Blockchain-Verified CNN-RNN Approach

The rapid proliferation of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) devices necessitates robust, privacy-preserving intrusion detection systems. While Federated Learning (FL) mitigates data privacy risks through localized training, it introduces vulnerabilities to model poisoning and computational bottlenecks on edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose a secure, hardware-optimized Blockchain-Federated Learning (BC-FL) framework. Deploying a lightweight Hybrid CNN-RNN model on Edge Gateways, we relieve end-sensors of heavy computational tasks. To overcome the ‘cold-start’ problem, we introduce a Domain-Adaptive Transfer Learning strategy, dynamically adapting a pre-trained binary classifier to a multi-class task (Normal, Mirai, Bashlite). Furthermore, a lightweight blockchain ledger provides an immutable audit trail and a reputation-based isolation mechanism to penalize malicious nodes. Evaluated on the N-BaIoT dataset, the proposed 3-class CNN-RNN model achieves 95.62% overall accuracy, with precision/recall/F1-scores of 0.99/0.91/0.95 for Mirai and 0.93/0.99/0.96 for Bashlite attacks. The framework reduces communication bandwidth by 96% compared to centralized learning. During simulated Byzantine attacks, the reputation mechanism successfully banned malicious nodes, maintaining a robust 95.62% global accuracy. This framework offers a highly scalable, secure, and computationally feasible solution for real-time anomaly detection in resource-constrained IoT edge environments.