REU Site: Hands-On Research in Federated Learning Security through Red Team vs. Blue Team Exercises

NSF Award Search · 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT · $460,922 · view on nsf.gov ↗

Abstract

This Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas supports 10 students each year in a 10-week summer research program on the security of federated learning, a way for many devices or organizations to train a shared artificial intelligence model without exchanging their raw data. This approach can help protect privacy, but it also creates new security risks because attackers may try to corrupt the training process, steal information from the model, or reduce system reliability. The project’s novelties are the integration of hands-on attack-and-defense research across the full federated learning process and the use of Red Team versus Blue Team exercises to study these problems in realistic settings. The project's broader significance and importance are that it advances safer privacy-preserving artificial intelligence, expands access to advanced undergraduate research opportunities, and helps prepare the future artificial intelligence and cybersecurity workforce. The project contributes to a stronger national capacity for building trustworthy data-driven systems. The research project focuses on threats and defenses in the data collection, training, and inference stages of federated learning. Students and mentors investigate representative attacks including botnet-style disruption, poisoning, backdoor insertion, privacy leakage, membership inference, and data reconstruction, and they evaluate defenses such as robust aggregation, anomaly

Key facts

NSF award ID
2548041
Awardee
University of Nevada Las Vegas (NV)
SAM.gov UEI
DLUTVJJ15U66
PI
Junggab Son
Primary program
01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
All programs
Artificial Intelligence (AI), EXP PROG TO STIM COMP RES, REU SITE-Res Exp for Ugrd Site
Estimated total
$460,922
Funds obligated
$460,922
Transaction type
Standard Grant
Period
10/01/2026 → 09/30/2029