The Internet of Things (IoT) integrates billions of smart devices that can communicate with one another with minimal human intervention. IoT is one of the fastest developing fields in the history of computing, with an estimated 50 billion devices by the end of 2020. However, the crosscutting nature of IoT systems and the multidisciplinary components involved in the deployment of such systems have introduced new security challenges. Implementing security measures, such as encryption, authentication, access control, network and application security for IoT devices and their inherent vulnerabilities is ineffective. Therefore, existing security methods should be enhanced to effectively secure the IoT ecosystem. Machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL) have advanced considerably over the last few years, and machine intelligence has transitioned from laboratory novelty to practical machinery in several important applications. Consequently, ML/DL methods are important in transforming the security of IoT systems from merely facilitating secure communication between devices to security-based intelligence systems. The goal of this work is to provide a comprehensive survey of ML methods and recent advances in DL methods that can be used to develop enhanced security methods for IoT systems. IoT security threats that are related to inherent or newly introduced threats are presented, and various potential IoT system attack surfaces and the possible threats related to each surface are discussed. We then thoroughly review ML/DL methods for IoT security and present the opportunities, advantages and shortcomings of each method. We discuss the opportunities and challenges involved in applying ML/DL to IoT security. These opportunities and challenges can serve as potential future research directions.
Identification of anomaly and malicious traffic in the Internet of things (IoT) network is essential for the IoT security to keep eyes and block unwanted traffic flows in the IoT network. For this purpose, numerous machine learning (ML) technique models are presented by many researchers to block malicious traffic flows in the IoT network. However, due to the inappropriate feature selection, several ML models prone misclassify mostly malicious traffic flows. Nevertheless, the significant problem still needs to be studied more in-depth that is how to select effective features for accurate malicious traffic detection in IoT network. To address the problem, a new framework model is proposed. Firstly, a novel feature selection metric approach named CorrAUC proposed, and then based on CorrAUC, a new feature selection algorithm name Corrauc is develop and design, which is based on wrapper technique to filter the features accurately and select effective features for the selected ML algorithm by using AUC metric. Then, we applied integrated TOPSIS and Shannon Entropy based on a bijective soft set to validate selected features for malicious traffic identification in the IoT network. We evaluate our proposed approach by using the Bot-IoT dataset and four different ML algorithms. Experimental results analysis showed that our proposed method is efficient and can achieve >96% results on average.
26 February 2019 in IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Machine learning (ML) techniques have been widely used in many smart city sectors, where a huge amount of data is gathered from various IoT devices. As a typical ML model, support vector machine (SVM) enables efficient data classification and thereby finds its applications in real-world scenarios such as disease diagnosis and anomaly detection. Training an SVM classifier usually requires a collection of labelled IoT data from multiple entities, raising great concerns about data privacy. Most of the existing solutions rely on an implicit assumption that the training data can be reliably collected from multiple data providers, which is often not the case in reality. To bridge the gap between ideal assumptions and realistic constraints, in this paper, we propose secureSVM, which is a privacy-preserving SVM training scheme over blockchain-based encrypted IoT data. We utilize the blockchain techniques to build a secure and reliable data sharing platform among multiple data providers, where IoT data is encrypted and then recorded on a distributed ledger. We design secure building blocks, such as secure polynomial multiplication and secure comparison, by employing a homomorphic cryptosystem, Paillier, and construct a secure SVM training algorithm, which requires only two interactions in a single iteration, with no need for a trusted third-party. Rigorous security analysis prove that the proposed scheme ensures the confidentiality of the sensitive data for each data provider as well as the SVM model parameters for data analysts. Extensive experiments demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed scheme.
16 March 2020 in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is considered as one of the most promising revolutionary technologies to prompt smart manufacturing and increase productivity. With manufacturing being more complicated and sophisticated, an entire manufacturing process usually involves several different administrative IoT domains (e.g., factories). Devices from different domains collaborate on the same task, which raises great security and privacy concerns about device-to-device communications. Existing authentication approaches may result in heavy key management overhead or rely on a trusted third party. Thus, security and privacy issues during communication remain unsolved but imperative. In this paper, we present an efficient blockchain-assisted secure device authentication mechanism BASA for cross-domain IIoT. Specifically, consortium blockchain is introduced to construct trust among different domains. Identity-based signature (IBS) is exploited during the authentication process. To preserve the privacy of devices, we design an identity management mechanism, which can realize that devices being authenticated remain anonymous. Besides, session keys between two parties are negotiated, which can secure the subsequent communications. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed mechanism.
11 January 2021 in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Decentralized Applications (DApps) are increasingly developed and deployed on blockchain platforms such as Ethereum. DApp fingerprinting can identify users' visits to specific DApps by analyzing the resulting network traffic, revealing much sensitive information about the users, such as their real identities, financial conditions and religious or political preferences. DApps deployed on the same platform usually adopt the same communication interface and similar traffic encryption settings, making the resulting traffic less discriminative. Existing encrypted traffic classification methods either require hand-crafted and fine-tuning features or suffer from low accuracy. It remains a challenging task to conduct DApp fingerprinting in an accurate and efficient way. In this paper, we present GraphDApp, a novel DApp fingerprinting method using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). We propose a graph structure named Traffic Interaction Graph (TIG) as an information-rich representation of encrypted DApp flows, which implicitly reserves multiple dimensional features in bidirectional client-server interactions. Using TIG, we turn DApp fingerprinting into a graph classification problem and design a powerful GNN-based classifier. We collect real-world traffic datasets from 1,300 DApps with more than 169,000 flows. The experimental results show that GraphDApp is superior to the other state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy in both closed- and open-world scenarios. In addition, GraphDApp maintains its high accuracy when being applied to the traditional mobile application classification.
30 August 2019 in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technologies, numerous IoT devices and sensors transmit huge amounts of data to cloud data centers for further processing. While providing us considerable convenience, cloud-based computing and storage also bring us many security problems, such as the abuse of information collection and concentrated web servers in the cloud. Traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS) and web application firewalls (WAF) are becoming incompatible with the new network environment, and related systems with machine learning or deep learning are emerging. However, cloud-IoT systems increase attacks against web servers, since data centralization carries a more attractive reward. In this paper, based on distributed deep learning, we propose a web attack detection system that takes advantage of analyzing URLs. The system is designed to detect web attacks and is deployed on edge devices. The cloud handles the above challenges in the paradigm of the Edge of Things (EoT). Multiple concurrent deep models are used to enhance the stability of the system and the convenience in updating. We implemented experiments on the system with two concurrent deep models and compared the system with existing systems by using several datasets. The experimental results with 99.410% in accuracy, 98.91% in TPR and 99.55% in DRN demonstrate the system is competitive in detecting web attacks.