Multi-task learning for IoT traffic classification: A comparative analysis of deep autoencoders

Abstract

As a system allowing intra-network devices to automatically communicate over the Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT) faces increasing popularity in modern applications and security threats — particularly network intrusions that target both networks and devices. A major threat is network attacks that attempt to obtain unauthorised access and damage the networks or systems. To effectively safeguard against these attacks, it is essential to use efficient hybrid intrusion detection systems with advanced techniques. Deep learning-based algorithms, such as Autoencoders (AEs), have been recognised as efficient methods for intrusion detection. However, it is crucial to further analyse the impact of different structures on detection performance. This paper proposes a method combining AE for data reconstruction and anomaly detection and multi-task learning (MTL)-structured models for IoT traffic classification. Additionally, we suggest a hybrid resampling technique with the Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique and Generative Adversarial Network (SMOTE-GAN) for enhanced training and conduct a comparative analysis of different neural networks with AEs. The experimental results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed AE-MTL approach compared with single-task learning. Additionally, while the performance varies on different datasets, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) have improved the detection of minor classes.