A Comprehensive Security Framework for Asymmetrical IoT Network Environments to Monitor and Classify Cyberattack via Machine Learning

Ali Alqahtani, Abdulaziz A. Alsulami, Nayef Alqahtani, Badraddin Alturki, Bandar M. Alghamdi

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an important component of the smart environment, which produces a large volume of data that is considered challenging to handle. In addition, the IoT architecture is vulnerable to many cyberattacks that can target operational devices. Therefore, there is a need for monitoring IoT traffic to analyze, detect malicious activity, and classify cyberattack types. This research proposes a security framework to monitor asymmetrical network traffic in an IoT environment. The framework offers a network intrusion detection system (NIDS) to detect and classify cyberattacks, implemented using a machine learning (ML) model residing in the middleware layer of the IoT architecture. A dimensionality reduction technique known as principal component analysis (PCA) is utilized to facilitate data transmission, which is intended to be sent from the middleware layer to the cloud layer with reduced complexity and fewer unnecessary inputs without compromising the information content. Therefore, the reduced IoT traffic data are sent to the cloud and the PCA data are retransformed to approximate the original data for visualizing the IoT traffic. The NIDS is responsible for reporting the attack type to the cloud in the event of an attack. Our findings indicate that the proposed framework has promising results in classifying the attack type, which achieved a classification accuracy of 98%. In addition, the dimension of the IoT traffic data is reduced by around 50% and it has a similarity of around 90% compared to the original data.