In this paper, we study a linear bandit optimization problem in a federated
setting where a large collection of distributed agents collaboratively learn a
common linear bandit model. Standard federated learning algorithms applied to
this setting are vulnerable to Byzantine attacks on even a small fraction of
agents. We propose a novel algorithm with a robust aggregation oracle that
utilizes the geometric median. We prove that our proposed algorithm is robust
to Byzantine attacks on fewer than half of agents and achieves a sublinear
$\tilde{\mathcal{O}}({T^{3/4}})$ regret with $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ steps of
communication in $T$ steps. Moreover, we make our algorithm differentially
private via a tree-based mechanism. Finally, if the level of corruption is
known to be small, we show that using the geometric median of mean oracle for
robust aggregation further improves the regret bound.