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2 November 2022

12 Pages

Intrusion Detection in IoT Using Deep Learning

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Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Abstract

Cybersecurity has been widely used in various applications, such as intelligent industrial systems, homes, personal devices, and cars, and has led to innovative developments that continue to face challenges in solving problems related to security methods for IoT devices. Effective security methods, such as deep learning for intrusion detection, have been introduced. Recent research has focused on improving deep learning algorithms for improved security in IoT. This research explores intrusion detection methods implemented using deep learning, compares the performance of different deep learning methods, and identifies the best method for implementing intrusion detection in IoT. This research is conducted using deep learning models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent units (GRUs). A standard dataset for intrusion detection in IoT is considered to evaluate the proposed model. Finally, the empirical results are analyzed and compared with the existing approaches for intrusion detection in IoT. The proposed method seemed to have the highest accuracy compared to the existing methods.

1. Introduction

Cybersecurity is one of the most challenging research topics in information technology [1,2]. It is particularly difficult to achieve when emerging technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), are involved. The internet of devices is estimated to grow to 50 billion by 2020 due to its proliferation in many upcoming applications, such as smart cities, smart homes, smart cars, and intelligent industrial systems [3,4]. This growth presents a huge risk to data privacy, integrity, and availability, which may be exploited by malicious actors. Cybersecurity is not just about protecting networks and systems from unauthorized access but also safeguarding data and privacy. In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on IoT security as many new applications that rely on connected devices are being developed [5,6].
With the growing popularity of IoT, attacks against connected devices have become a critical issue. IoT devices are vulnerable to attacks in many ways, such as denial of service, eavesdropping, and privilege escalation [7]. As a result, the need to protect IoT devices from these attacks is becoming increasingly important. [8]. In addition, IoT devices are physically distributed, thus causing unauthorized access to be easy [9]. Furthermore, various devices in such an integrated system rely on wireless networks for real-time communication, which is open to eavesdropping; thus, the system is exposed to cyber threats, including web injection, that could lead to the leakage of private information and data tampering [10]. Improved and highly resilient intrusion detection systems are needed for IoT devices. Deep learning can rapidly analyze large quantities of data and support automatic adjustments of security systems upon the detection of malware or security breaches while using low computational power [11,12,13]. Security systems built on deep learning do not need a network connection for threat detection and they operate across the devices, underlying operating systems, and files [14].
The selection of a suitable deep learning method in IoT can greatly help in intrusion detection [15,16]. Such selection can be performed by comparing methods to determine the most accurate one and then implementing the selected approach. This research has many benefits, such as improving accuracy and reducing the false alarm rate of intrusion detection by using deep learning methods. It can also positively affect human lives, the economy, technology, and the environment of IoT by strengthening its security [17].
To address the above mentioned issues, a method of intrusion detection is proposed and implemented using deep learning, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent units (GRUs). A standard dataset for intrusion detection in IoT is considered to evaluate the proposed model. The empirical findings are analyzed and compared with current IoT intrusion detection methods.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes related work. The description of the architectural model is presented in Section 3. The results are analyzed, compared, and discussed in Section 4. Section 5 concludes the paper and Section 6 presents the future direction of this work.

3. Material and Methods

The implementation of this research will follow a stepwise methodology that involves using a deep learning model to develop a comprehensive IoT security model that improves the accuracy of detecting security threats.
The model is shown in Figure 1. The first part of the figure shows the preprocessing of the datasets. The preprocessing consisted of three sub-steps: scaling, normalization, and data cleaning. Then, the dataset was labeled. The next classification step was performed using CNN, LSTM, and GRU. Afterward, we trained, tested, and evaluated our model.
Figure 1. Architecture model.

3.1. Step 1: Bot-IoT

This dataset was developed on a realistic network design with traffic from botnets and normal systems [30,31]. Attacks are categorized and thereafter labeled. Botnet traffic is created by compromised network nodes/bots that receive commands from a central node called the botmaster. Botnet traffic can be used to attack a system sending back information to the botmaster. In an IoT environment, traffic is sent over a publish and subscribe communication protocol implemented over TCP/IP [32,33,34].

3.2. Step 2: Pre-Processing of the Datasets

In this step, the raw dataset is processed and made suitable for a DL method. This procedure includes standardization, normalization, and data cleaning [35]. The step is divided into three sub-steps. The first sub-step is dataset standardization. This step is important because it ensures that the data are in the same scale and have a distribution value between 0 and 1 based on the standard normal distribution. The second sub-step is data normalization. Normalization consists of transforming the data. This step is important to avoid negative values, which are unacceptable to neural networks. We normalized all the data in the dataset between 0 and 1. The third step, data cleaning, consists of removing unwanted data, such as NaN and null values.

3.3. Step 3: Feature Selection

In this step, the best features are selected for the model. This step is important in DL because it affects the performance of the model. If we use an inappropriate set of features, the results of the model will be poor. Thus, in this step, we selected the features to be used by our model. We adopted four features for Bot-IoT. The features were “dur”, “rate”, “srate”, and “drate”, and these features were used to represent time and duration that affect the classification of attacks.

3.4. Step 4: Classification

This step adopts different models to predict the attack. We used three different types of neural networks to classify the attacks. These NNs were CNN, LSTM, and GRU. We employed TensorFlow and Kera to implement CNN, GRU, and LSTM and Python to implement the neural network models.

3.5. Step 5: Trained, Tested, and Evaluated

We trained the models with the selected features. In our model, we used 80% of the data for training and the remaining 20% for testing. Therefore, we could train and test the model with only 20% of the dataset. This allowed us to accurately predict the attack.

4. Results

This section contains experimental results implemented in Collaboratory by Google Research. All experiments were performed using the Python programming language. The datasets were divided into training and testing datasets for the experiments. The Bot-IoT dataset was divided into training and test sets 80%–20%, respectively. The number of samples in the test set for each dataset was equal to the size of the dataset. We used the Kera’s library to build our classifiers and we used TensorFlow as the backend of the Kera’s library. Table 2 describes training parameters of CNN. LSTM and GRU classifier training parameters are mentioned in Table 3.
Table 2. CNN classifier training parameters for Bot-IoT.
Table 3. LSTM and GRU classifier training parameters for Bot-IoT.
The results of the experiments in Table 4 below shows the results of the different classifiers in terms of accuracy and false alarm when applied to the Bot-IoT dataset. As we can see from the table, the LSTM accuracy rate is the highest compared to CNN and GRU. Table 5 presents precision, recall, and F1 score of CNN, LSTM, and GRU.
Table 4. Result experiment for accuracy and false alarm.
Table 5. Result experiment for precision, recall, and F1 score.
Figure 2 shows accuracy and false alarm among the CNN, LSTM, and GRU. The LSTM outperforms the CNN and GRU in accuracy which is 99.8% as compared to CNN and GRU. Figure 3 depicts the F1 score, recall, and precision for CNN, LSTM, and GRU. In regard to precision, the LSTM performs better than the CNN and GRU.
Figure 2. Experiment results for accuracy and false alarm.
Figure 3. Experiment results for precision, recall and F1 score.
We compared the performance of our proposed model with other state-of-the-art methods. The results are shown in Table 6.
Table 6. Model comparison with other state-of-the-art methods.
The experimental results for the three classifiers CNN, LSTM, and GRU are compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches. Figure 4 shows that our approach is effective compared to the existing state-of-the-art approach. In the Bot-IoT dataset, the proposed approach achieved the highest accuracy of 99.8%.
Figure 4. Accuracy comparison with existing approaches.

5. Conclusions

In this paper, we presented a study on the use of deep learning methods in detecting intrusions in IoT devices. In our work, we have used a standard dataset Bot-IoT for intrusion detection in IoT. We have also used different types of Deep Learning methods such as the Convolutional Neural Network, Gated Recurrent Unit, and Long Short Memory Neural Network for intrusion detection in IoT. We have evaluated the proposed model and compared it with existing approaches. The experimental results have shown that the proposed method can be effective for intrusion detection in IoT.

6. Future Works

We will explore more datasets for intrusion detection on IoT devices in future. Recently, some new IoT datasets have been made available. This work can also be extended to study other variants of classifiers such as genetic algorithm (GA) and bidirectional short-term memory (BiLSTM) for better performance.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, I.A. and A.M.B.; methodology, I.A.; software, A.M.B.; validation, I.A. and A.M.B.; formal analysis, I.A. and A.M.B.; investigation, A.M.B.; resources I.A.; data curation, I.A.; writing—original draft preparation, A.M.B.; writing—review and editing, I.A. and A.M.B.; visualization, I.A.; supervision, I.A.; project administration, I.A.; funding acquisition, I.A. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research work was funded by Institutional Fund Projects under grant no. (IFPRC-076-611-2020). The authors acknowledge technical and financial support from the Ministry of Education and King Abdulaziz University, DSR, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Not applicable.

Acknowledgments

This research work was funded by Institutional Fund Projects under grant no. (IFPRC-076-611-2020). Therefore, the authors gratefully acknowledge technical and financial support from the Ministry of Education and King Abdulaziz University, DSR, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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