PVBRF-ID: Private, Verifiable and Byzantine-Robust Federated Intrusion Detection for Oilfield Enterprise Networks

Abstract

Federated learning allows dispersed oilfield sites to train a shared intrusion detector without pooling network traffic, yet its aggregation step forces a choice between privacy and robustness. Byzantine-robust rules must read each update in the clear, whereas secure aggregation hides updates from the checks that detect poisoning. We present PVBRF-ID, a two-server protocol in which sites secret-share their updates and the servers jointly test each update's norm and its cosine similarity to a reference computed on a small clean root set, revealing one accept bit per site. Commitments, Merkle roots and a homomorphic audit make the inclusion of accepted updates publicly verifiable. On a 15-class Edge-IIoTset task with ten sites holding differently distributed data and ten random seeds, PVBRF-ID matched FedAvg on clean data (macro-F1 0.708 vs. 0.706) and withstood sign-flip attacks (0.696 vs. 0.091). Against an adaptive attacker controlling 30% of sites, PVBRF-ID with secure clipping reached 0.641, whereas FedAvg fell to 0.046; plaintext multi-Krum remained higher by 0.052. An update-inference attacker recovered each site's class mix from plaintext updates (Spearman correlation 0.81) but not from one server's view. Backdoors passed the filter, and noise-based mitigation gave only heuristic protection. The implementation uses Python 3.13, NumPy 2.3, 30 rounds and 10 seeds.