Sentinel: Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Personalized Federated Intrusion Detection in Heterogeneous IoT Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Singh, Gurpreet, Sood, Keshav, Rajalakshmi, P., Xiang, Yong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Singh, Gurpreet
Sood, Keshav
Rajalakshmi, P.
Xiang, Yong
author_facet Singh, Gurpreet
Sood, Keshav
Rajalakshmi, P.
Xiang, Yong
contents Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving paradigm for machine learning, but its application in intrusion detection systems (IDS) within IoT networks is challenged by severe class imbalance, non-IID data, and high communication overhead.These challenges severely degrade the performance of conventional FL methods in real-world network traffic classification. To overcome these limitations, we propose Sentinel, a personalized federated IDS (pFed-IDS) framework that incorporates a dual-model architecture on each client, consisting of a personalized teacher and a lightweight shared student model. This design effectively balances deep local adaptation with efficient global model consensus while preserving client privacy by transmitting only the compact student model, thus reducing communication costs. Sentinel integrates three key mechanisms to ensure robust performance: bidirectional knowledge distillation with adaptive temperature scaling, multi-faceted feature alignment, and class-balanced loss functions. Furthermore, the server employs normalized gradient aggregation with equal client weighting to enhance fairness and mitigate client drift. Extensive experiments on the IoTID20 and 5GNIDD benchmark datasets demonstrate that Sentinel significantly outperforms state-of-the-art federated methods, establishing a new performance benchmark, especially under extreme data heterogeneity, while maintaining communication efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_23019
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sentinel: Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Personalized Federated Intrusion Detection in Heterogeneous IoT Networks
Singh, Gurpreet
Sood, Keshav
Rajalakshmi, P.
Xiang, Yong
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving paradigm for machine learning, but its application in intrusion detection systems (IDS) within IoT networks is challenged by severe class imbalance, non-IID data, and high communication overhead.These challenges severely degrade the performance of conventional FL methods in real-world network traffic classification. To overcome these limitations, we propose Sentinel, a personalized federated IDS (pFed-IDS) framework that incorporates a dual-model architecture on each client, consisting of a personalized teacher and a lightweight shared student model. This design effectively balances deep local adaptation with efficient global model consensus while preserving client privacy by transmitting only the compact student model, thus reducing communication costs. Sentinel integrates three key mechanisms to ensure robust performance: bidirectional knowledge distillation with adaptive temperature scaling, multi-faceted feature alignment, and class-balanced loss functions. Furthermore, the server employs normalized gradient aggregation with equal client weighting to enhance fairness and mitigate client drift. Extensive experiments on the IoTID20 and 5GNIDD benchmark datasets demonstrate that Sentinel significantly outperforms state-of-the-art federated methods, establishing a new performance benchmark, especially under extreme data heterogeneity, while maintaining communication efficiency.
title Sentinel: Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Personalized Federated Intrusion Detection in Heterogeneous IoT Networks
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23019