A deep transfer learning approach for IoT/IIoT cyber attack detection using telemetry data

The rise of internet connectivity across the globe increases the count of IoT (internet of things)/IIoT (industrial internet of things) devices exponentially. The objects/devices which are connected to the internet are always prone to malicious attacks at various levels, such as physical, network, fog, and applications, which exist in the IoT architecture. Many researchers have addressed this issue and designed their own solutions based on machine and deep learning techniques. It is undeniable that deep learning outperforms machine learning (ML), but it necessitates a massive amount of datasets with appropriate labels. In this work, the deep transfer learning (TL) technique has been adapted for gated recurrent unit (GRU). Each model is trained using a dataset that belongs to one source IoT device (source domain), and this trained model is used to classify the malicious traffic in another dataset that belongs to some other IoT device (target domain). This approach is used for binary classification. These transfer learning models have been evaluated using an IoT/IIoT telemetry dataset called ToN IoT which comprises the sensor data generated from the seven different types of IoT devices. The highest accuracy achieved by IoT garage door was upto 99.76% as a source domain by fixing IoT thermostat as target domain. These models were also evaluated using some more metrics such as precision, recall, F1-measure, training time and testing time. By implementing transfer learning based GRU model, the accuracy of the model is improved from 69.20% to 99.76%. Moreover, to prove the efficiency of the proposed model, it is compared with state of art deep learning model and its results were analyzed in a detailed manner.