Securing Industrial Internet of Things Against Botnet Attacks Using Hybrid Deep Learning Approach

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) formation of richer ecosystem of intelligent interconnected devices while enabling new levels of digital innovation has essentially transformed and revolutionized global manufacturing and industry 4.0. Conversely, the prevalent distributed nature of IIoT, Industrial 5G, underlying IoT sensing devices, IT/OT convergence, Edge Computing, and Time Sensitive Networking makes it an impressive and potential target for cyber-attackers. Multi-variant persistent and sophisticated bot attacks are considered catastrophic for connects IIoTs. Besides, botnet attack detection is extremely complex and decisive. Thus, efficient and timely detection of IIoT botnets is a dire need of the day. We propose a hybrid intelligent Deep Learning (DL)-enabled mechanism to secure IIoT infrastructure from lethal and sophisticated multi-variant botnet attacks. The proposed mechanism has been rigorously evaluated with latest available dataset, standard and extended performance evaluation metrics, and current DL benchmark algorithms. Besides,cross validation of our results are also performed to clearly show overall performance. The proposed mechanisms outperforms in identifying accurately multi-variant sophisticated bot attacks. Besides, our proposed technique also show promising results in terms of speed efficiency.