Enhancing IoT Security: A Few-Shot Learning Approach for Intrusion Detection

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Recently, the number of Internet of Things (IoT)-connected devices has increased daily. Consequently, cybersecurity challenges have increased due to the natural diversity of the IoT, limited hardware resources, and limited security capabilities. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) play a substantial role in securing IoT networks. Several researchers have focused on machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) to develop intrusion detection techniques. Although ML is good for classification, other methods perform better in feature transformation. However, at the level of accuracy, both learning techniques have their own certain compromises. Although IDSs based on ML and DL methods can achieve a high detection rate, the performance depends on the training dataset size. Incidentally, collecting a large amount of data is one of the main drawbacks that limits performance when training datasets are lacking, and such methods can fail to detect novel attacks. Few-shot learning (FSL) is an emerging approach that is employed in different domains because of its proven ability to learn from a few training samples. Although numerous studies have addressed the issues of IDSs and improved IDS performance, the literature on FSL-based IDSs is scarce. Therefore, an investigation is required to explore the performance of FSL in IoT IDSs. This work proposes an IoT intrusion detection model based on a convolutional neural network as a feature extractor and a prototypical network as an FSL classifier. The empirical results were analyzed and compared with those of recent intrusion detection approaches. The accuracy results reached 99.44%, which shows a promising direction for involving FSL in IoT IDSs.