Deep learning based intelligent IDS for Large-scale IoT networks
Authors: Isha Andrade, Shalaka S Mahadik, Mithun Mukherjee, Pranav M Pawar, Raja Muthalagu
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Dubai Campus, Dubai International Academic City, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
The proliferation of large-scale IoT networks has been both a blessing and a curse. Not only has it revolutionized the way organizations operate by increasing the efficiency of automated procedures, but it has also simplified our daily lives. However, while IoT networks have improved convenience and connectivity, they have also increased security risk due to unauthorized devices gaining access to these networks and exploiting existing weaknesses with specific attack types. The research proposes two lightweight deep learning (DL)-based intelligent intrusion detection systems (IDS). to enhance the security of IoT networks: the proposed convolutional neural network (CNN)-based IDS and the proposed long short-term memory (LSTM)-based IDS. The research evaluated the performance of both intelligent IDSs based on DL using the CICIoT2023 dataset. DL-based intelligent IDSs successfully identify and classify various cyber threats using binary, grouped, and multi-class classification. The proposed CNN-based IDS achieves an accuracy of 99.34%, 99.02% and 98.6%, while the proposed LSTM-based IDS achieves an accuracy of 99.42%, 99.13%, and 98.68% for binary, grouped, and multi-class classification, respectively.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Example of large-scale IoT and its features
Type of classifications
Binary
Grouped
Multi-Class
FL + client DNN [ 6 ]
99%
-
-
DNN-BiLSTM [ 7 ]
-
-
93.13%
DNN [ 8 ]
99.71%
98.76%
98.81%
MLP-CNN [ 9 ]
-
-
99.95%
DL + (ADASYN and SMOTE) [ 10 ]
99.97%
-
99.99%
TABLE I: Comparison of various state-of-the-art DL methods used for detecting IoT network attacks from three classifications perspectives
Fig. 2: Feature importance graph [ 30 ]
Sr.no
Feature name
Sr.no
Feature name
Sr.no
Feature name
1
Srate
8
Header_Length
15
syn_flag_number
2
Rate
9
flow_duration
16
rst_count
3
Duration
10
Max
17
UDP
4
syn_count
11
HTTP
18
fin_count
5
Weight
12
Protocol Type
19
Variance
6
ack_flag_number
13
urg_count
20
IAT
TABLE II: Top 20 selected features [ 30 ]
Attack Name
Total Samples
Training Samples
Testing Samples
Dataset_Binary [ 30 ]
4,668,653
3,734,922
933,731
Dataset_Group [ 30 ]
4,668,653
3,734,921
933,732
Dataset_Multi [ 30 ]
4,570,593
3,656,475
914,118
TABLE III: Dataset Details
Fig. 3: Architecture of proposed CNN-based IDS
Fig. 4: Architecture of proposed LSTM-based IDS
Software specification:
Software Tool
Jupyter Notebook 6.5.4
Programming Language
Python 3.11.4, Sklearn library, Matplotlib 3.7.1
API Tool
Keras on TensorFlow 2.14.0
Hardware specification:
Processor
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80 GHz, Windows 11 64-bit OS
With the rapid proliferation of IoT devices, security concerns have dramatically escalated and intrusion detection systems have become critical for protecting networked environments. This paper presents an improved CNN-LSTM based intrusion detection model that combines multi-class classification, dataset integration, and temporal feature learning to enhance detection performance in IoT networks. Using network traffic data, the proposed approach is evaluated on intrusion detection tasks and achieves an accuracy of approximately 97%. Experimental results demonstrate that the model effectively detects multiple attack categories while maintaining stable training and validation performance. The integration of convolutional and recurrent neural network components enables the framework to capture both spatial and temporal characteristics of network traffic, improving overall intrusion detection capability in IoT environments.
Mohammad Tariq Ikhlas, Pohanyar Khowaja Khil, Malik Muhammad Mueed Aslam +1
The rapid expansion of Industrial IoT (IIoT) systems has amplified security challenges, as heterogeneous devices and dynamic traffic patterns increase exposure to sophisticated and previously unseen cyberattacks. Traditional intrusion detection systems often struggle in such environments due to their reliance on extensive labeled data and limited ability to detect new threats. To address these challenges, we propose MI2DAS, a multi-layer intrusion detection framework that integrates anomaly-based hierarchical traffic pooling, open-set recognition to distinguish between known and unknown attacks and incremental learning for adapting to novel attack types with minimal labeling. Experiments conducted on the Edge-IIoTset dataset demonstrate strong performance across all layers. In the first layer, GMM achieves superior normal-attack discrimination (accuracy = 0.953, TPR = 1.000). In open-set recognition, GMM attains a recall of 0.813 for known attacks, while LOF achieves 0.882 recall for unknown attacks. For fine-grained classification of known attacks, Random Forest achieves a macro-F1 of 0.941. Finally, the incremental learning module maintains robust performance when incorporation novel attack classes, achieving a macro-F1 of 0.8995. These results showcase MI2DAS as an effective, scalable and adaptive framework for enhancing IIoT security against evolving threats.
Wei Lian, Alejandro Guerra-Manzanares
School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has created an urgent demand for adaptive, resource-efficient Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) capable of handling dynamic and evolving cyber threats. This paper investigates AOC-IDS, a state-of-the-art autonomous online IDS published at IEEE INFOCOM 2024, which employs an Autoencoder (AE) with Cluster Repelling Contrastive (CRC) loss and an autonomous Gaussian-based decision module. We first successfully replicate AOC-IDS on the UNSW-NB15 benchmark, achieving 89.39% accuracy in close agreement with the published 89.19%. We then identify four key limitations: class imbalance, unreliable pseudo-label generation, limited generalization, and computational overhead for IoT deployment, and propose targeted improvements for each. Our XGBoost-BalSamp method achieves 95.45% accuracy on UNSW-NB15, a gain of 6.26% over the baseline. Our combined deep learning approach (PseudoFilter, MixupAug, and LiteAE) achieves a best-run accuracy of 90.88% (F1: 91.45%), surpassing the base paper while reducing model parameters by 55%.These results demonstrate that targeted improvements to AOC-IDS yield consistent accuracy gains while improving practical deployability on IoT edge devices.