A multi-class neural network model for rapid detection of IoT botnet attacks

Abstract

The tremendous number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their widespread use have made our lives considerably more manageable and safer. At the same time, however, the vulnerability of these innovations means that our day-to-day existence is surrounded by insecure devices, thereby facilitating ways for cybercriminals to launch various attacks by large-scale robot networks (botnets) through IoT. In consideration of these issues, we propose a neural network-based model to detect IoT botnet attacks. Furthermore, the model provides multi-classification, which is necessary for taking appropriate countermeasures to understand and stop the attacks. In addition, it is independent and does not require specific equipment or software to fetch the required features. According to the conducted experiments, the proposed model is accurate and achieves 99.99%, 99.04% as F1 score for two benchmark datasets in addition to fulfilling IoT constraints regarding complexity and speed. It is less complicated in terms of computations, and it provides real-time detection that outperformed the state-of-theart, achieving a detection time ratio of 1:5 and a ratio of 1:8.