Privacy-Preserving and Poisoning-Robust Federated Learning for Industrial IoT

Abstract

With the rapid development of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), large amounts of sensor data generated by industrial devices and edge nodes have become the basis of intelligent manufacturing applications. Collaborative modeling on these distributed data is important for tasks such as anomaly detection, equipment monitoring, and predictive maintenance. Federated learning offers a practical way to train models without exposing raw sensor data, but it still faces privacy leakage and malicious poisoning attacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes a hierarchical privacy protection and poisoning-robust defense framework for industrial federated learning. Starting from the sensitivity differences among parameters at different model layers, the proposed method designs a hierarchical privacy-budget allocation strategy that enhances protection for sensitive information while minimizing the performance impact of perturbation. Meanwhile, a multi-layer, multi-feature anomaly-detection mechanism is adopted to identify malicious updates by jointly exploiting directional consistency, scale stability, and inter-layer similarity, and majority voting together with update clipping is used to further improve system robustness. Experiments on Fashion-MNIST, MVTec AD, and C-MAPSS demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively suppress global-model degradation under multiple poisoning attacks and achieves a favorable balance among privacy protection strength, robustness, and training efficiency.