Physics-Attested Federated Learning: Securing Collaborative Anomaly Detection in Critical Water Infrastructure

Federated learning enables industrial operators to train shared intrusion detection models without disclosing proprietary operational telemetry. However, existing defences operate strictly in update space, leaving aggregators blind to data poisoning; model updates derived from fabricated telemetry remain indistinguishable from honest contributions. We repurpose process invariants, physical relations that always hold in normal operation, such as the conservation of mass, from runtime detection heuristics into a verifiable admission requirement for federated updates, mined automatically from clean operational data. We evaluate this admission gate across two physical water testbeds (SWaT and WADI) and a distribution benchmark (BATADAL), testing seven aggregation rules against telemetry fabrication, exposure-only replay poisoning, and an invariant-aware adaptive adversary. Across three testbeds, the mined invariants reject none of 25 honest shards except every cross-channel fabrication on SWaT and BATADAL, including optimised perturbations that the similarity-based FoolsGold admits in full. On real telemetry, five mined invariants detect 12 of SWaT’s 35 attacks, while nine invariants detect 20. With nine invariants, the admission gate removes 78% of the targeted-attack recall lost to replay poisoning (95% CI 57–97%, p<0.001 over 20 seeds) across five standard aggregators and 82% under FedAvg. To reconcile physical admission control with federated data privacy, we show invariant compliance using zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to allow clients to prove batch adherence without revealing operational telemetry.