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JCM 2026 Vol.21(4): 578-592
Doi: 10.12720/jcm.21.4.578-592

Federated Learning for Privacy-preserving Internet of Things (IoT) Security: A Decentralized Intrusion Detection Framework

Muhammad Shaharyar Ramzan 1, Arshad Ali 2, and Rafi us Shan3,*
1Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and IT, Superior University, Lahore, Pakistan
2Faculty of Computer and Information Systems, Islamic University of Madinah, Almadinah Almunawarah, Saudi Arabia
3Faculty of Computer Information Science, Higher Colleges of Technology, Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Email: shaharyarramzan56@gmail.com (M.S.R.); a.ali@iu.edu.sa (A.A.); rshan@hct.ac.ae (R.u.S.)
*Corresponding author

Manuscript received March 27, 2026; revised May 10, 2026; accepted May 22, 2026; published August 25, 2026

Abstract—The proposed study suggests a to help cope with issues related to cybersecurity in Internet of Things and Industrial Internet of Things environments without compromising privacy. The proposed framework introduces several innovative features, such as federated learning with momentum-based optimization, adaptive differential privacy, trust verification via blockchain, and Byzantine-resilient aggregation, to enhance the security, scalability, and robustness of the system compared with traditional intrusion detection systems. It also integrates supervised classification with autoencoder-based anomaly detection to detect existing and emerging cyberattacks. The proposed system was assessed with respect to the extended Industrial Internet of Things Intrusion Dataset (X-IIoT) and Network‑Based Botnet Attack detection for IoT (N-BaIoT) benchmark datasets, where the environments were simulated as federated ones. The accuracy of the Hybrid Robust Federated Intrusion Detection System increased to 97.15% on X-IIoT and 97.64% on N-BaIoT with only 41 communication rounds and was resilient against up to 20% of Byzantine clients. These results showcase its efficacy to secure, private and communication-efficient intrusion detection for next generation Internet of Things and Hybrid Robust Federated Intrusion Detection System networks.  
 
Keywords—Internet of Things (IoT), industrial internet of things, federated learning, intrusion detection system


Cite: Muhammad Shaharyar Ramzan, Arshad Ali, and Rafi us Shan, "Federated Learning for Privacy-preserving Internet of Things (IoT) Security: A Decentralized Intrusion Detection Framework," Journal of Communications, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 578-592, 2026.

Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

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