Trustworthy Distributed Machine Learning in Cloud-Edge-IoT Systems: A Heterogeneity-Aware Survey of Security, Privacy, and Robustness

Distributed machine learning (DML), including conventional distributed training and federated learning (FL), enables collaborative model development across cloud-edge-IoT systems without fully centralizing raw data. However, distributing data, computation, updates, and orchestration increases the attack surface and introduces coupled challenges across privacy, robustness, reliability, fairness, and governance. This survey presents a security-centered, heterogeneity-aware roadmap for trustworthy DML, with FL treated as a prominent high-risk case. We first characterize the assets, adversaries, trust assumptions, and coordination patterns that define DML/FL security boundaries. We then analyze how statistical, system, and trust heterogeneity, including non-IID data, resource asymmetry, intermittent participation, and cross-silo/cross-device trust differences, affect convergence, fairness, attack detectability, and defense reliability. Next, we synthesize attack-defense interactions across poisoning, backdoors, Byzantine manipulation, privacy leakage, model extraction, network/orchestration attacks, Sybil behavior, and strategic participation. We further compare layered defenses, including robust aggregation, drift-aware optimization, differential privacy, secure aggregation, homomorphic encryption, secure multiparty computation, trusted execution environments, watermarking, provenance, authenticated communication, and monitoring. Finally, we discuss deployment, evaluation, governance, and open research guidelines, emphasizing reproducible, non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) partitions, attack-aware benchmarks, privacy budgets, attack success rate, client-level disparity, latency, communication, memory, energy/carbon overhead, and auditable lifecycle artifacts.

DOI

10.1109/JIOT.2026.3742225.