Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train
models without sharing their local data, and becomes an important
privacy-preserving machine learning framework. However, classical FL faces
serious security and robustness problem, e.g., malicious clients can poison
model updates and at the same time claim large quantities to amplify the impact
of their model updates in the model aggregation. Existing defense methods for
FL, while all handling malicious model updates, either treat all quantities
benign or simply ignore/truncate the quantities of all clients. The former is
vulnerable to quantity-enhanced attack, while the latter leads to sub-optimal
performance since the local data on different clients is usually in
significantly different sizes. In this paper, we propose a robust
quantity-aware aggregation algorithm for federated learning, called FedRA, to
perform the aggregation with awareness of local data quantities while being
able to defend against quantity-enhanced attacks. More specifically, we propose
a method to filter malicious clients by jointly considering the uploaded model
updates and data quantities from different clients, and performing
quantity-aware weighted averaging on model updates from remaining clients.
Moreover, as the number of malicious clients participating in the federated
learning may dynamically change in different rounds, we also propose a
malicious client number estimator to predict how many suspicious clients should
be filtered in each round. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the
effectiveness of our FedRA method in defending FL against quantity-enhanced
attacks.