F-ACVAE: A Federated Adaptive Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder for Privacy-Preserving Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of Internet of things (IoT) devices has significantly expanded the cyber-attack surface, necessitating robust and privacy-preserving intrusion detection systems (IDS). However, centralized learning approaches often suffer from severe performance degradation due to high-dimensional traffic data, extreme class imbalance, and highly non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data across heterogeneous edge devices. To address these challenges, this paper proposes F-ACVAE, a federated adaptive conditional variational autoencoder framework that enables collaborative model training across distributed IoT devices without sharing raw data. F-ACVAE incorporates selective parameter aggregation, where local encoders remain private while globally shared components are synchronized to preserve discriminative latent structures. To further enhance stability under extreme non-IID settings and feature distribution shifts, we introduce a novel constrained momentum Gaussian aggregation (CMGA) strategy that combines update clamping with momentum-based smoothing to mitigate client drift. Extensive experiments on the N-BaIoT dataset demonstrate that F-ACVAE achieves an average accuracy and macro F1-score of 99\%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, the selective aggregation mechanism reduces communication overhead by approximately 62\%, making the framework particularly suitable for resource-constrained IoT environments. These results highlight the effectiveness of F-ACVAE in achieving high detection performance while ensuring privacy preservation and communication efficiency.