Ensemble averaging deep neural network for botnet detection in heterogeneous Internet of Things devices

Abstract

The botnet attack is one of the coordinated attack types that can infect Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cause them to malfunction. Botnets can steal sensitive information from IoT devices and control them to launch another attack, such as a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack or email spam. This attack is commonly detected using a network-based Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) that monitors the network device’s activity. However, IoT network is dynamic and IoT devices have many types with different configurations and vendors in IoT environments. Therefore, this research proposes an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) by ensemble-ing traffic from heterogeneous IoT devices. This research proposes Deep Neural Network (DNN) to create a training model from each heterogeneous IoT device. After that, each training model from each heterogeneous IoT device is used to predict the traffic. The prediction results from each training model are averaged using the ensemble averaging method to determine the final result. This research used the N-BaIoT dataset to validate the proposed IDS model. Based on experimental results, ensemble averaging DNN can detect botnet attacks in heterogeneous IoT devices with an average accuracy of 97.21, precision of 91.41, recall of 87.31, and F1-score 88.48.