Due to its distributed nature, federated learning is vulnerable to poisoning
attacks, in which malicious clients poison the training process via
manipulating their local training data and/or local model updates sent to the
cloud server, such that the poisoned global model misclassifies many
indiscriminate test inputs or attacker-chosen ones. Existing defenses mainly
leverage Byzantine-robust federated learning methods or detect malicious
clients. However, these defenses do not have provable security guarantees
against poisoning attacks and may be vulnerable to more advanced attacks. In
this work, we aim to bridge the gap by proposing FLCert, an ensemble federated
learning framework, that is provably secure against poisoning attacks with a
bounded number of malicious clients. Our key idea is to divide the clients into
groups, learn a global model for each group of clients using any existing
federated learning method, and take a majority vote among the global models to
classify a test input. Specifically, we consider two methods to group the
clients and propose two variants of FLCert correspondingly, i.e., FLCert-P that
randomly samples clients in each group, and FLCert-D that divides clients to
disjoint groups deterministically. Our extensive experiments on multiple
datasets show that the label predicted by our FLCert for a test input is
provably unaffected by a bounded number of malicious clients, no matter what
poisoning attacks they use.

FLCert 是一种基于集成学习方法的联邦学习框架，对有限数量的恶意客户端攻击具有可证明的安全性，通过将客户端分组、使用现有联邦学习算法为每组客户端学习全局模型并在全局模型之间取多数投票来分类测试输入，成功地抵御有限数量的恶意客户端攻击。