Competitive Advantage Attacks to Decentralized Federated Learning

Decentralized federated learning (DFL) enables clients (e.g., hospitals and banks) to jointly train machine learning models without a central orchestration server. In each global training round, each client trains a local model on its own training data and then they exchange local models for aggregation. In this work, we propose SelfishAttack, a new family of attacks to DFL. In SelfishAttack, a set of selfish clients aim to achieve competitive advantages over the remaining nonselfish ones, i.e., the final learnt local models of the selfish clients are more accurate than those of the non-selfish ones. Towards this goal, the selfish clients send carefully crafted local models to each remaining non-selfish one in each global training round. We formulate finding such local models as an optimization problem and propose methods to solve it when DFL uses different aggregation rules. Theoretically, we show that our methods find the optimal solutions to the optimization problem. Empirically, we show that SelfishAttack successfully increases the accuracy gap (i.e., competitive advantage) between the final learnt local models of selfish clients and those of non-selfish ones. Moreover, SelfishAttack achieves larger accuracy gaps than poisoning attacks when extended to increase competitive advantages. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/jyqhahah/SelfishAttack.