Intrusion detection in internet of things using supervised machine learning based on application and transport layer features using UNSW-NB15 data-set

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are well-connected; they generate and consume data which involves transmission of data back and forth among various devices. Ensuring security of the data is a critical challenge as far as IoT is concerned. Since IoT devices are inherently low-power and do not require a lot of compute power, a Network Intrusion Detection System is typically employed to detect and remove malicious packets from entering the network. In the same context, we propose feature clusters in terms of Flow, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) by using features in UNSW-NB15 data-set. We eliminate problems like over-fitting, curse of dimensionality and imbalance in the data-set. We apply supervised Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, i.e., Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine and Artificial Neural Networks on the clusters. Using RF, we, respectively, achieve 98.67% and 97.37% of accuracy in binary and multi-class classification. In clusters based techniques, we achieved 96.96%, 91.4% and 97.54% of classification accuracy by using RF on Flow & MQTT features, TCP features and top features from both clusters. Moreover, we show that the proposed feature clusters provide higher accuracy and requires lesser training time as compared to other state-of-the-art supervised ML-based approaches.