Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning-Based Intrusion Detection System for IoHT Devices

In recent years, Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) devices have attracted significant attention from computer scientists, healthcare professionals, and patients. These devices enable patients, especially in areas without access to hospitals, to easily record and transmit their health data to medical staff via the Internet. However, the analysis of sensitive health information necessitates a secure environment to safeguard patient privacy. Given the sensitivity of healthcare data, ensuring security and privacy is crucial in this sector. Federated learning (FL) provides a solution by enabling collaborative model training without sharing sensitive health data with third parties. Despite FL addressing some privacy concerns, the privacy of IoHT data remains an area needing further development. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving federated learning framework to enhance the privacy of IoHT data. Our approach integrates federated learning with ϵ-differential privacy to design an effective and secure intrusion detection system (IDS) for identifying cyberattacks on the network traffic of IoHT devices. In our FL-based framework, SECIoHT-FL, we employ deep neural network (DNN) including convolutional neural network (CNN) models. We assess the performance of the SECIoHT-FL framework using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and privacy budget (ϵ). The results confirm the efficacy and efficiency of the framework. For instance, the proposed CNN model within SECIoHT-FL achieved an accuracy of 95.48% and a privacy budget (ϵ) of 0.34 when detecting attacks on one of the datasets used in the experiments. To facilitate the understanding of the models and the reproduction of the experiments, we provide the explainability of the results by using SHAP and share the source code of the framework publicly as free and open-source software.