Privacy-Aware Anomaly Detection in IoT Environments using FedGroup: A Group-Based Federated Learning Approach

The popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart homes has raised significant concerns regarding data security and privacy. Traditional machine learning (ML) methods for anomaly detection often require sharing sensitive IoT data with a central server, posing security and efficiency challenges. In response, this paper introduces FedGroup, a novel Federated Learning (FL) method inspired by FedAvg. FedGroup revolutionizes the central model’s learning process by updating it based on the learning patterns of distinct groups of IoT devices. Our experimental results demonstrate that FedGroup consistently achieves comparable or superior accuracy in anomaly detection when compared to both federated and non-federated learning methods. Additionally, Ensemble Learning (EL) collects intelligence from numerous contributing models, leading to enhanced prediction performance. Furthermore, FedGroup significantly improves the detection of attack types and their details, contributing to a more robust security framework for smart homes. Our approach demonstrates exceptional performance, achieving an accuracy rate of 99.64% with a minimal false positive rate (FPR) of 0.02% in attack type detection, and an impressive 99.89% accuracy in attack type detail detection.