Federated Attack Campaign Detection via Contrastive Encoding of Threat Indicators in Gradient Updates

Federated Learning enables decentralized model training by exchanging model updates--rather than raw data--with a central parameter server (PS). While most of the existing defenses primarily assume static or independently acting adversaries, we reveal a new class of dynamically adaptive attacks that systematically bypass such protections. We propose Fed-ADR, a holistic attack framework in which a malicious orchestrator server (OS) dynamically coordinates a heterogeneous set of adversarial clients, including both targeted and untargeted attackers. Through real-time coordination by the OS, malicious clients strategically adapt their gradient updates to evade defenses deployed by the PS, while either severely degrading global model performance or steering training toward adversarial objectives.To mitigate this threat, we offer a detection mechanism that estimates each client's true gradient from historical updates, enabling real-time detection of coordinated malicious behavior without additional overhead. We further introduce an in-situ recovery mechanism that restores global model performance without restarting training, preserving convergence and minimizing recovery time. Comprehensive experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fed-ADR's attack scheme can reduce global accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, bypassing several state-of-the-art defenses. When our detection and recovery modules are employed, they identify malicious clients and restore accuracy to over 90% within a few rounds, at a substantially lower cost than retraining from scratch--achieving a reduction of at least 20x in computational overhead.

Flipping 60% of training labels from a single Byzantine client using label-flipping model poisoning self-degrades an attacker's own federated detection accuracy, $99.96\%$ (at no poisoning rate) to $84.33\%$ in a three-client federated IDS. Where the Federated global ensemble maintains stable accuracy across all tested poison rates, without a defense mechanism in place and without coordination between attackers. In this paper, we present empirical results quantifying the impact of label-flipping poisoning attacks on a three-client federated IDS trained on CICIDS2017 with non-IID attack subtype distributions across clients. We demonstrate that the signal of the adversarial self-compromise represents a detectable anomaly for exploitation for Byzantine client identification in the absence of target data exfiltration. We note that the aggregation step uses a Federated Forest (tree concatenation) rather than a parametric FedAvg; the results therefore measure the impact of poisoning on per-client performance under ensemble aggregation, and extension to genuine FedAvg with a parametric classifier is planned for future work.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without exposing raw data, yet remains vulnerable to malicious clients injecting poisoned datasets. Existing defenses are typically reactive (operating during training) or supervised (requiring prior knowledge of attack types) - assumptions that rarely hold in open-ended IoT deployments. We propose WaSA, a fully unsupervised, offline framework for malicious client detection. Before training, each client transmits a single, privacy-preserving spectral summary of its data to the server. A denoising autoencoder, trained solely on clean auxiliary data, scores clients based on their deviation from the learned benign manifold, identifying corruptions regardless of the attack type. WaSA requires no attack labels, generalizes to unseen anomalies, and introduces a Boltzmann sampling strategy for client selection that smoothly interpolates between hard exclusion and standard aggregation. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 under diverse attack scenarios (up to 90 % malicious clients) demonstrate consistent improvements over supervised baselines and robust aggregation methods, with negligible communication overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/alelicciardi99/wavelet_autoencoders_malicious.