Literature Database Entry

li2025user

Kai Li, Yilei Liang, Pietro Liò, Wei Ni, Falko Dressler, Jon Crowcroft and Ozgur B. Akan, "User Isolation Poisoning on Decentralized Federated Learning: An Adversarial Message Passing Graph Neural Network Approach," IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, December 2025. (online first)

Abstract

This paper proposes a new cyberattack on Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL), named User Isolation Poisoning (UIP). While following the standard DFL protocol of receiving and aggregating benign local models, a malicious user strategically generates and distributes compromised updates to undermine the learning process. The objective of the new UIP attack is to diminish the impact of benign users by isolating their model updates, thereby manipulating the shared model to reduce the learning accuracy. To realize this attack, we design a novel threat model that leverages an adversarial Message Passing Graph (MPG) neural network. Through iterative message passing, the adversarial MPG progressively refines the representations (also known as embeddings or hidden states) of each benign local model update. By orchestrating feature exchanges among connected nodes in a targeted manner, the malicious users effectively curtail the genuine data features of benign local models, thereby diminishing their overall influence within the DFL process. The MPG-based UIP attack is implemented in PyTorch, demonstrating that it effectively reduces the test accuracy of DFL by 49.5%, and successfully evades existing cosine similarity-based and Euclidean distance-based defense strategies.

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Kai Li
Yilei Liang
Pietro Liò
Wei Ni
Falko Dressler
Jon Crowcroft
Ozgur B. Akan

BibTeX reference

@article{li2025user,
    author = {Li, Kai and Liang, Yilei and Li{\`{o}}, Pietro and Ni, Wei and Dressler, Falko and Crowcroft, Jon and Akan, Ozgur B.},
    doi = {10.1109/TNNLS.2025.3636440},
    note = {to appear},
    title = {{User Isolation Poisoning on Decentralized Federated Learning: An Adversarial Message Passing Graph Neural Network Approach}},
    journal = {IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems},
    issn = {2162-2388},
    publisher = {IEEE},
    month = {12},
    year = {2025},
   }
   
   

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Last modified: 2025-12-15