IoT Botnet Detection Using Autoencoders and Decision Trees

Abstract

The use of IoT devices has grown rapidly, leading to an increase in cyber attacks that pose greater security and privacy threats than ever before. One such threat is botnet attacks on IoT devices. An IoT botnet is a group of Internet-connected IoT devices infected with malware and remotely controlled by an attacker. Machine learning techniques can be employed to detect botnet attacks. The use of machine learning-based detection methods has been shown to be effective in identifying cyber attacks. The performance of the detection system in machine learning can be improved by utilizing data reduction methods. The data reduction process in classification is used to overcome the problem of scalability and computation resources in the IoT. This paper proposes a detection system using the Autoencoder reduction method and the Decision tree classification method. The test results demonstrate that the Deep Autoencoder algorithm can reduce data and memory usage from 1.62 GB to 75.9 MB, while also improving the performance of decision tree classification, resulting in a high level of accuracy up to 100%. The Autoencoder approach in conjunction with the Decision Tree exhibits superior capabilities compared to previous studies.