Denial-of-Service or Fine-Grained Control: Towards Flexible Model Poisoning Attacks on Federated Learning

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Zhang, H
Yao, Z
Zhang, LY
Hu, S
Chen, C
Liew, A
Li, Z
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2023
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Macao, China

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Federated learning (FL) is vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where adversaries corrupt the global aggregation results and cause denial-of-service (DoS). Unlike recent model poisoning attacks that optimize the amplitude of malicious perturbations along certain prescribed directions to cause DoS, we propose a flexible model poisoning attack (FMPA) that can achieve versatile attack goals. We consider a practical threat scenario where no extra knowledge about the FL system (e.g., aggregation rules or updates on benign devices) is available to adversaries. FMPA exploits the global historical information to construct an estimator that predicts the next round of the global model as a benign reference. It then fine-tunes the reference model to obtain the desired poisoned model with low accuracy and small perturbations. Besides the goal of causing DoS, FMPA can be naturally extended to launch a fine-grained controllable attack, making it possible to precisely reduce the global accuracy. Armed with precise control, malicious FL service providers can gain advantages over their competitors without getting noticed, hence opening a new attack surface in FL other than DoS. Even for the purpose of DoS, experiments show that FMPA significantly decreases the global accuracy, outperforming six state-of-the-art attacks.

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

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© 2023 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the Conference's website for access to the definitive, published version.

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Artificial intelligence

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Zhang, H; Yao, Z; Zhang, LY; Hu, S; Chen, C; Liew, A; Li, Z, Denial-of-Service or Fine-Grained Control: Towards Flexible Model Poisoning Attacks on Federated Learning, Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2023, pp. 4567-4575