Federated learning-enabled intrusion detection with adversarial robustness for secure and scalable communications in heterogeneous UAV swarms
摘要
Intrusion detection in UAV swarms operating in Urban Air Mobility (UAM) environments is challenged by non-IID data distributions, privacy constraints, and vulnerability to adversarial and Byzantine attacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes FL-GIIDS-AR, a robust and privacy-preserving federated intrusion detection framework that integrates personalized federated learning (FedPer), Byzantine-resilient aggregation, and transferability-aware adversarial training. The framework is evaluated using both UAV telemetry data and the public CICIDS2017 benchmark under a unified federated setup. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves up to 96.3% detection accuracy, an AUC of 0.978, and an F1-score of 93.8%, while maintaining a low false positive rate of 3.7%. Under adversarial settings, the model demonstrates strong robustness, achieving over 90% robust accuracy against FGSM and PGD attacks. Additionally, the proposed approach reduces communication overhead by approximately 30–35% compared to standard federated learning methods, while maintaining stable convergence even with up to 30% Byzantine clients. These results demonstrate that FL-GIIDS-AR effectively balances robustness, efficiency, and adaptability, making it suitable for secure and scalable UAV swarm environments.