GRU-based Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Intrusion Detection in SDN-Enabled IoT Networks
Authors
Conventional security measures have become ineffective against advanced cyber threats due substantial attack surface resulting from the quick growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) allows centralized control, yet it also engenders privacy issues and complicates scalability. This paper proposes a privacy-preserving Intrusion Detection System (IDS) by integrating Software-Defined Networking (SDN) with a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-based Federated Learning (FL) framework. The proposed SDN-FL-GRU model is different from centralized approaches because it lets distributed IoT nodes work together to train a global intrusion detection model without sharing raw data. It does this by using the FedAvg algorithm to combine the data in an efficient way. Testing the proposed framework on the CICIDS2017dataset shows that it can accurately detect complex attacks while keeping data private, with a detection accuracy of 93.4% and an F1-score of 92.8%. The results obtained indicate that the GRU-based approach outperforms traditional distributed models regarding convergence speed and effectiveness in resource-constrained edge environments.
Keywords:
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- Published: 2026-04-05
- Issue: Vol. 9 No. 2 (2026): second issue
- Section: Articles








