Edge Learning for 6G-enabled Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey of Vulnerabilities, Datasets, and Defenses

TL;DR

This comprehensive survey reviews the vulnerabilities, datasets, and defense strategies related to edge learning in 6G-enabled IoT, highlighting recent threats and solutions for secure, intelligent network applications.

Contribution

It provides a detailed taxonomy of attacks and defenses in edge learning for 6G IoT, integrating recent research and future prospects in this emerging field.

Findings

Classified eight categories of attacks on edge learning.

Compared state-of-the-art defense methods systematically.

Identified future research directions for secure 6G IoT.

Abstract

The ongoing deployment of the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks constantly reveals limitations concerning its original concept as a key driver of Internet of Everything (IoE) applications. These 5G challenges are behind worldwide efforts to enable future networks, such as sixth generation (6G) networks, to efficiently support sophisticated applications ranging from autonomous driving capabilities to the Metaverse. Edge learning is a new and powerful approach to training models across distributed clients while protecting the privacy of their data. This approach is expected to be embedded within future network infrastructures, including 6G, to solve challenging problems such as resource management and behavior prediction. This survey article provides a holistic review of the most recent research focused on edge learning vulnerabilities and defenses for 6G-enabled IoT. We summarize the existing surveys on machine learning for 6G IoT security and machine learning-associated threats in three different learning modes: centralized, federated, and distributed. Then, we provide an overview of enabling emerging technologies for 6G IoT intelligence. Moreover, we provide a holistic survey of existing research on attacks against machine learning and classify threat models into eight categories, including backdoor attacks, adversarial examples, combined attacks, poisoning attacks, Sybil attacks, byzantine attacks, inference attacks, and dropping attacks. In addition, we provide a comprehensive and detailed taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art defense methods against edge learning vulnerabilities. Finally, as new attacks and defense technologies are realized, new research and future overall prospects for 6G-enabled IoT are discussed.