Network anomaly detection methods in IoT environments via deep learning: A Fair comparison of performance and robustness

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key enabler in closing the loop in Cyber-Physical Systems, providing “smartness” and thus additional value to each monitored/controlled physical asset. Unfortunately, these devices are more and more targeted by cyberattacks because of their diffusion and of the usually limited hardware and software resources. This calls for designing and evaluating new effective approaches for protecting IoT systems at the network level (Network Intrusion Detection Systems, NIDSs). These in turn are challenged by the heterogeneity of IoT devices and the growing volume of transmitted data.To tackle this challenge, we select a Deep Learning architecture to perform unsupervised early anomaly detection. With a data-driven approach, we explore in-depth multiple design choices and exploit the appealing structural properties of the selected architecture to enhance its performance. The experimental evaluation is performed on two recent and publicly available IoT datasets (IoT-23 and Kitsune). Finally, we adopt an adversarial approach to investigate the robustness of our solution in the presence of Label Flipping poisoning attacks. The experimental results highlight the improved performance of the proposed architecture, in comparison to both well-known baselines and previous proposals.