# FedEDAuth -- Federated Embedding Distribution Authentication for Counterfeit IC Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15885 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15885/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Federated unlearning and poisoning, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 11 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Federated unlearning and poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/safety/federated-unlearning-and-poisoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [Byzantine-Robust Distributed Learning: Towards Optimal Statistical Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01498/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning for Mobile Keyboard Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03604/) (2018)
- [Local Model Poisoning Attacks to Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11815/) (2019)
- [Fall of Empires: Breaking Byzantine-tolerant SGD by Inner Product Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03936/) (2019)
- [Certified Robustness to Label-Flipping Attacks via Randomized Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03018/) (2020)
- [Label Sanitization against Label Flipping Poisoning Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00992/) (2018)
- [Challenges and Approaches for Mitigating Byzantine Attacks in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14468/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning for Connected and Automated Vehicles: A Survey of Existing Approaches and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10407/) (2023)
- [Learning Assisted Side Channel Delay Test for Detection of Recycled ICs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12704/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The widespread of counterfeit integrated circuits (ICs) poses severe risks to the security, reliability, and trustworthiness of modern electronic systems. Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving paradigm for collaborative counterfeit detection across the semiconductor supply chain, but its vulnerability to byzantine data poisoning attacks limits practical deployment. This paper presents Federated Embedding Distribution Authentication (FedEDAuth), a lightweight, embedding level client authentication framework that detects and filters malicious participants before model aggregation. FedEDAuth leverages reference embedding distributions derived from a golden dataset and evaluates clients using outlier analysis, mean shift measurements, and micro-cluster behavior without requiring access to raw data or gradients. Integrated into standard FL pipelines, FedEDAuth consistently identifies all poisoned clients in experimental settings with 50 distributed participants under the byzantine data poisoning attack, achieving a 100% malicious client detection rate. After filtering, the federated model achieved a high counterfeit IC classification performance of 94.17% accuracy. These results not only validate FedEDAuth's effectiveness but also underscore the broader potential of secure, trustworthy FL frameworks as a critical advancement for next generation hardware security solutions, enabling robust, collaborative intelligence across the semiconductor supply chain.