Fog-based Attack Detection Framework for Internet of Things Using Deep Learning

The number of cyber-attacks and data breaches has immensely increased across different enterprises, companies, and industries as a result of the exploitation of the weaknesses in securing Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The increasing number of various devices connected to IoT and their different protocols has led to growing volume of zero-day attacks. Deep learning (DL) has demonstrated its superiority in big data fields and cyber-security. Recently, DL has been used in cyber-attacks detection because of its capability of extracting and learning deep features of known attacks and detecting unknown attacks without the need for manual feature engineering. However, DL cannot be implemented on IoT devices with limited resources because it requires extensive computation, strong power and storage capabilities. This paper presents a comprehensive attack detection framework of a distributed, robust, and high detection rate to detect several IoT cyber-attacks using DL. The proposed framework implements an attack detector on fog nodes because of its distributed nature, high computational capacity and proximity to edge devices. Six DL models are compared to identify the DL model with the best performance. All DL models are evaluated using five different datasets, each of which involves various attacks. Experiments show that the long short-term memory model outperforms the five other DL models. The proposed framework is effective in terms of response time and detection accuracy and can detect several types of cyber-attacks with 99.97% detection rate and 99.96% detection accuracy in binary classification and 99.65% detection accuracy in multi-class classification.