The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to detect phishing emails is
primarily dependent on large-scale centralized datasets, which opens it up to a
myriad of privacy, trust, and legal issues. Moreover, organizations are loathed
to share emails, given the risk of leakage of commercially sensitive
information. So, it is uncommon to obtain sufficient emails to train a global
AI model efficiently. Accordingly, privacy-preserving distributed and
collaborative machine learning, particularly Federated Learning (FL), is a
desideratum. Already prevalent in the healthcare sector, questions remain
regarding the effectiveness and efficacy of FL-based phishing detection within
the context of multi-organization collaborations. To the best of our knowledge,
the work herein is the first to investigate the use of FL in email
anti-phishing. This paper builds upon a deep neural network model, particularly
RNN and BERT for phishing email detection. It analyzes the FL-entangled
learning performance under various settings, including balanced and
asymmetrical data distribution. Our results corroborate comparable performance
statistics of FL in phishing email detection to centralized learning for
balanced datasets, and low organization counts. Moreover, we observe a
variation in performance when increasing organizational counts. For a fixed
total email dataset, the global RNN based model suffers by a 1.8% accuracy drop
when increasing organizational counts from 2 to 10. In contrast, BERT accuracy
rises by 0.6% when going from 2 to 5 organizations. However, if we allow
increasing the overall email dataset with the introduction of new organizations
in the FL framework, the organizational level performance is improved by
achieving a faster convergence speed. Besides, FL suffers in its overall global
model performance due to highly unstable outputs if the email dataset
distribution is highly asymmetric.