Federated learning has been rapidly evolving and gaining popularity in recent years due to its privacy-preserving features, among other advantages. Nevertheless, the exchange of model updates and gradients in this architecture provides new attack surfaces for malicious users of the network which may jeopardize the model performance and user and data privacy. For this reason, one of the main motivations for decentralized federated learning is to eliminate server-related threats by removing the server from the network and compensating for it through technologies such as blockchain. However, this advantage comes at the cost of challenging the system with new privacy threats. Thus, performing a thorough security analysis in this new paradigm is necessary. This survey studies possible variations of threats and adversaries in decentralized federated learning and overviews the potential defense mechanisms. Trustability and verifiability of decentralized federated learning are also considered in this study.

There has been an increasing interest in the design of intelligent diagnostic systems for industrial applications. The key requirement in the design of practical diagnostic systems is the ability for decision making in high-dimensional feature spaces, where the prior knowledge about the system states in terms of labels is very limited. Moreover, the problem of diagnosing simultaneous defects is rarely addressed on real industrial applications. This work aims to develop a semi-supervised deep-learning scheme for diagnosing multiple defects including simultaneous ones in a gearbox directly connected to an induction machine shaft. This scheme consists of two main modules: information fusion and decision making. The former integrates captured multiple sensory streams into a very high dimensional feature space. The latter uses a semi-supervised deep learning procedure to minimize the human interaction during the training and maximize the diagnostic efficiency. This scheme facilitates learning and diagnosing defects under harshest conditions (i) where only a few number of labeled samples are collected together with a large number of unlabeled samples, and (ii) in a very high-dimensional feature space. Several state-of-the-art semi-supervised and supervised learners have also been included in the scheme, enabling a comparative experiment for diagnosing simultaneous defects.

This paper proposes a novel adversarial scheme for learning from data under harsh learning conditions of partially labelled samples and skewed class distributions. This novel scheme integrates the generative ability of the state-of-the-art conditional generative adversarial network with the semi-supervised deep ladder network and semi-supervised deep auto-encoder. The proposed generative-adversarial based semi-supervised learning framework, named GBSS, is a triple network that aims to optimize a newly defined objective function to enhance the performance of the semi-supervised learner with the help of a generator and discriminator. The duel between the generator and discriminator results in the generation of more synthetic minority class samples that are very similar to the original minority samples (attacks and faults). Meanwhile, GBSS trains the semi-supervised model to learn the general distribution of the minority class samples including the newly generated samples in contrast to other classes and iteratively adjusts its weights. Moreover, a diagnostic framework is designed, in which GBSS and several state-of-the-art semi-supervised learners are used for learning and diagnosing attacks and faults in power grids. These methods are evaluated and compared for diagnosing attacks and faults in two different power grid cases. The attained results demonstrate the superiority of GBSS in diagnosing attacks and faults under the harsh conditions.

Design of the data-driven diagnostic systems usually requires to have labeled data during the training session. This paper aims to design a hybrid data-driven framework for diagnosing faults, where the data labels are not available to a large extent. This hybrid framework has five steps for transforming raw vibration signals to informative sets of samples for decision making. It uses several state-of-the-art approaches for feature extraction and semi-supervised feature reduction. The decision making step uses a number of state-of-the-art semi-supervised learners. This step also comprises a novel surface estimation approach that is developed for semi-supervised learning. The proposed hybrid framework is applied for diagnosing bearing defects in induction motors and validated based on four scenarios, each of which is experimented with different amounts of labeled samples. The attained diagnostic accuracies show the efficiency of the proposed hybrid framework including the novel semi-supervised learner in classifying bearing defects, regardless of the number of labeled samples.

The ever-growing number of cyber attacks in today’s digitally interconnected world requires highly efficient intrusion detection systems (IDSs), which accurately identify both frequent and rare network intrusions. One of the most important challenges in IDSs is the class imbalance problem of network traffic flow data, where benign traffic flow significantly outweighs attack instances. This directly affects the ability of machine learning models to identify minority class threats. This paper is intended to evaluate various machine learning algorithms under different levels of class imbalances, using resampling as a strategy for this problem. The paper will provide an experimental comparison by combining various algorithms for classification and class imbalance learning, assessing the performance through the F1-score and geometric mean (G-mean). The work will contribute to creating robust and adaptive IDS through the judicious integration of resampling with machine learning models, thus helping the domain of cybersecurity to become resilient.

This paper presents a novel data-driven framework to aid in system state estimation when the power system is under unobservable false data injection attacks. The proposed framework dynamically detects and classifies false data injection attacks. Then, it retrieves the control signal using the acquired information. This process is accomplished in three main modules, with novel designs, for detection, classification, and control signal retrieval. The detection module monitors historical changes of phasor measurements and captures any deviation pattern caused by an attack on a complex plane. This approach can help to reveal characteristics of the attacks including the direction, magnitude, and ratio of the injected false data. Using this information, the signal retrieval module can easily recover the original control signal and remove the injected false data. Further information regarding the attack type can be obtained through the classifier module. The proposed ensemble learner is compatible with harsh learning conditions including the lack of labeled data, concept drift, concept evolution, recurring classes, and independence to external updates. The proposed novel classifier can dynamically learn from data and classify attacks under all these harsh learning conditions. The introduced framework is evaluated w.r.t. real-world data captured from the Central New York Power System. The obtained results indicate the efficacy and stability of the proposed framework.