When Clients Are Orchestrated: Strategic Gradient Manipulation to Defeat Federated Learning Servers with Efficient Defense

Abstract

Federated Learning enables decentralized model training by exchanging model updates--rather than raw data--with a central parameter server (PS). While most of the existing defenses primarily assume static or independently acting adversaries, we reveal a new class of dynamically adaptive attacks that systematically bypass such protections. We propose Fed-ADR, a holistic attack framework in which a malicious orchestrator server (OS) dynamically coordinates a heterogeneous set of adversarial clients, including both targeted and untargeted attackers. Through real-time coordination by the OS, malicious clients strategically adapt their gradient updates to evade defenses deployed by the PS, while either severely degrading global model performance or steering training toward adversarial objectives.To mitigate this threat, we offer a detection mechanism that estimates each client's true gradient from historical updates, enabling real-time detection of coordinated malicious behavior without additional overhead. We further introduce an in-situ recovery mechanism that restores global model performance without restarting training, preserving convergence and minimizing recovery time. Comprehensive experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fed-ADR's attack scheme can reduce global accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, bypassing several state-of-the-art defenses. When our detection and recovery modules are employed, they identify malicious clients and restore accuracy to over 90% within a few rounds, at a substantially lower cost than retraining from scratch--achieving a reduction of at least 20x in computational overhead.