A Stacked Deep Learning Approach for IoT Cyberattack Detection

Internet of things (IoT) devices and applications are dramatically increasing worldwide, resulting in more cybersecurity challenges. Among these challenges are malicious activities that target IoT devices and cause serious damage, such as data leakage, phishing and spamming campaigns, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and security breaches. In this paper, a stacked deep learning method is proposed to detect malicious traffic data, particularly malicious attacks targeting IoT devices. The proposed stacked deep learning method is bundled with five pretrained residual networks (ResNets) to deeply learn the characteristics of the suspicious activities and distinguish them from normal traffic. Each pretrained ResNet model consists of 10 residual blocks. We used two large datasets to evaluate the performance of our detection method. We investigated two heterogeneous IoT environments to make our approach deployable in any IoT setting. Our proposed method has the ability to distinguish between benign and malicious traffic data and detect most IoT attacks. The experimental results show that our proposed stacked deep learning method can provide a higher detection rate in real time compared with existing classification techniques.