IoT crawler with behavior analyzer at fog layer for detecting malicious nodes

Abstract

The limitations in terms of power and processing in IoT (Internet of Things) nodes make nodes an easy prey for malicious attacks, thus threatening business and industry. Detecting malicious nodes before they trigger an attack is highly recommended. The paper introduces a special purpose IoT crawler that works as an inspector to catch malicious nodes. This crawler is deployed in the Fog layer to inherit its capabilities, and to be an intermediate connection between the things and the cloud computing nodes. The crawler collects data streams from IoT nodes, upon a priority criterion. A behavior analyzer, with a machine learning core, detects malicious nodes according to the extracted node behavior from the crawler collected data streams. The performance of the behavior analyzer was investigated using three machine learning algorithms: Adaboost, Random forest and Extra tree. The behavior analyzer produces better testing accuracy, for the tested data, when using Extra tree compared to Adaboost and Random forest; it achieved 98.3% testing accuracy with Extra tree.