StratFL: Countering Covert Model Poisoning Attacks with Strategic Federated Learning
Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are a major concern in federated learning (FL) deployments in critical sectors such as healthcare, and finance. Traditional defense mechanisms fail to contain APTs due to their intermittent attacking behavior. This paper addresses a specific type of APT called covert model poisoning (CMP) where the attacker intermittently injects poisoned model updates in a covert manner. The interaction between the FL server and a CMP attacker is modeled as an imperfect repeated game where both players cannot observe each other's actions. A novel adversarial search algorithm called StratFL is designed alongside novel belief update algorithms at both the server and adver...
| Authors | Manoj Twarakavi, Venkata Sriram Siddhardh Nadendla |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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