  Federated Learning (FL) has recently become an effective approach for
cyberattack detection systems, especially in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks.
By distributing the learning process across IoT gateways, FL can improve
learning efficiency, reduce communication overheads and enhance privacy for
cyberattack detection systems. Challenges in implementation of FL in such
systems include unavailability of labeled data and dissimilarity of data
features in different IoT networks. In this paper, we propose a novel
collaborative learning framework that leverages Transfer Learning (TL) to
overcome these challenges. Particularly, we develop a novel collaborative
learning approach that enables a target network with unlabeled data to
effectively and quickly learn knowledge from a source network that possesses
abundant labeled data. It is important that the state-of-the-art studies
require the participated datasets of networks to have the same features, thus
limiting the efficiency, flexibility as well as scalability of intrusion
detection systems. However, our proposed framework can address these problems
by exchanging the learning knowledge among various deep learning models, even
when their datasets have different features. Extensive experiments on recent
real-world cybersecurity datasets show that the proposed framework can improve
more than 40% as compared to the state-of-the-art deep learning based
approaches.
