Mean/Std: Lightweight Distribution-Aware Aggregation for Federated IoT Botnet Detection

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving IoT intrusion detection, but its effectiveness can be substantially degraded by the combination of heterogeneous non-IID client distributions and severe multi-class imbalance. Under such conditions, conventional size-based aggregation may overemphasize large yet highly skewed clients, limiting the representation of minority attack classes in the global model. To address this issue, we propose Mean/Std, a lightweight distribution-aware aggregation strategy that combines a client-size proxy with two complementary statistics of local label distributions, namely the standard deviation and the dominance gap of class proportions, while preserving a communication footprint comparable to FedAvg. Experiments on the N-BaIoT benchmark, comprising seven heterogeneous IoT clients and eleven traffic classes, are conducted under a privacy-oriented update-perturbation setting inspired by secure aggregation workflows. The results show that Mean/Std consistently provides the strongest imbalance-aware performance among the evaluated FL baselines, achieving a Macro-F1 score of 0.8418 and a Balanced Accuracy of 0.8722 while improving the representation of minority attack classes. Additional experiments across five independent random seeds and a comprehensive hyperparameter sensitivity analysis further confirm the robustness and stability of the proposed aggregation mechanism. Overall, the results demonstrate that lightweight distribution-aware aggregation offers an effective, robust, and practically deployable solution for mitigating aggregation bias under simultaneous non-IID heterogeneity and severe multi-class imbalance in FL-based IoT botnet detection.