Edge Learning for 6G-enabled Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey of Vulnerabilities, Datasets, and Defenses
The ongoing deployment of the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks
constantly reveals limitations concerning its original concept as a key driver
of Internet of Everything (IoE) applications. These 5G challenges are behind
worldwide efforts to enable future networks, such as sixth generation (6G)
networks, to efficiently support sophisticated applications ranging from
autonomous driving capabilities to the Metaverse. Edge learning is a new and
powerful approach to training models across distributed clients while
protecting the privacy of their data. This approach is expected to be embedded
within future network infrastructures, including 6G, to solve challenging
problems such as resource management and behavior prediction. This survey
article provides a holistic review of the most recent research focused on edge
learning vulnerabilities and defenses for 6G-enabled IoT. We summarize the
existing surveys on machine learning for 6G IoT security and machine
learning-associated threats in three different learning modes: centralized,
federated, and distributed. Then, we provide an overview of enabling emerging
technologies for 6G IoT intelligence. Moreover, we provide a holistic survey of
existing research on attacks against machine learning and classify threat
models into eight categories, including backdoor attacks, adversarial examples,
combined attacks, poisoning attacks, Sybil attacks, byzantine attacks,
inference attacks, and dropping attacks. In addition, we provide a
comprehensive and detailed taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the
state-of-the-art defense methods against edge learning vulnerabilities.
Finally, as new attacks and defense technologies are realized, new research and
future overall prospects for 6G-enabled IoT are discussed.