Unsupervised ensemble based deep learning approach for attack detection in IoT network

Abstract

SummaryThe Internet of Things (IoT) has altered living by controlling devices/things over the Internet. IoT has specified many smart solutions for daily problems, transforming cyber‐physical systems (CPS) and other classical fields into smart regions. Most of the edge devices that make up the Internet of Things have very minimal processing power. To bring down the IoT network, attackers can utilize these devices to conduct a variety of network attacks. In addition, as more and more IoT devices are added, the potential for new and unknown threats grows exponentially. For this reason, an intelligent security framework for IoT networks must be developed that can identify such threats. In this paper, we have developed an unsupervised ensemble learning model that is able to detect new or unknown attacks in an IoT network from an unlabeled dataset. The system‐generated labeled dataset is used to train a deep learning model to detect IoT network attacks. Additionally, the research presents a feature selection mechanism for identifying the most relevant aspects in the dataset for detecting attacks. The study shows that the suggested model is able to identify the unlabeled IoT network datasets and DBN (Deep Belief Network) outperform the other models with a detection accuracy of 97.5% and a false alarm rate of 2.3% when trained using labeled dataset supplied by the proposed approach.