A combination learning framework to uncover cyber attacks in IoT networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly expanding, connecting an increasing number of devices daily. Having diverse and extensive networking and resource-constrained devices creates vulnerabilities to various cyber-attacks. The IoT with the supervision of Software Defined Network (SDN) enhances the network performance through its flexibility and adaptability. Different methods have been employed for detecting security attacks; however, they are often computationally efficient and unsuitable for such resource-constraint environments. Consequently, there is a significant requirement to develop efficient security measures against a range of attacks. Recent advancements in deep learning (DL) models have paved the way for designing effective attack detection methods. In this study, we leverage Genetic Algorithm (GA) with a correlation coefficient as a fitness function for feature selection. Additionally, mutual information (MI) is applied for feature ranking to measure their dependency on the target variable. The selected optimal features were used to train a hybrid DNN model to uncover attacks in IoT networks. The hybrid DNN integrates Convolutional Neural Network, Bi-Gated Recurrent Units (Bi-GRU), and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) for training the input data. The performance of our proposed model is evaluated against several other baseline DL models, and an ablation study is provided. Three key datasets InSDN, UNSW-NB15, and CICIoT 2023 datasets, containing various types of attacks, were used to assess the performance of the model. The proposed model demonstrates an impressive accuracy and detection time over the existing model with lower resource consumption.