Botnet Detection in the Internet of Things through All-in-one Deep Autoencoding

In the past years Internet of Things (IoT) has received increasing attention by academia and industry due to the potential use in several human activities; however, IoT devices are vulnerable to various types of attacks. Many existing intrusion detection proposals in the IoT leverage complex machine learning architectures, which may provide one separate model per device or per attack. These solutions are not suited to the dynamicity and scale of modern IoT environments. This paper proposes an initial analysis of the problem in the context of deep autoencoders and the detection of botnet attacks. Our findings, obtained by means of the N-BaIoT dataset, indicate that it is relatively easy to achieve impressive detection results by training-testing separate and minimal deep autoenconders on the top of the data individual IoT devices. More important, our all-in-one deep autoencoding proposal, which consists in training a single model with the benign traffic collected from different IoT devices, allows to preserve the overall detection performance obtained through separate autoencoders. The all-in-one model can pave the way for more scalable intrusion detection solutions in the context of IoT.