An ensemble deep learning based IDS for IoT using Lambda architecture

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized our world today by providing greater levels of accessibility, connectivity and ease to our everyday lives. It enables massive amounts of data to be traversed across multiple heterogeneous devices that are all interconnected. This phenomenon makes IoT networks vulnerable to various network attacks and intrusions. Building an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for IoT networks is challenging as they enable a massive amount of data to be aggregated, which is difficult to handle and analyze in real time mainly because of the heterogeneous nature of IoT devices. This inefficient, traditional IDS approach accentuates the need to develop advanced IDS techniques by employing Machine or Deep Learning. This paper presents a deep ensemble-based IDS using Lambda architecture by following a multi-pronged classification approach. Binary classification uses Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) to differentiate between malicious and benign traffic, while the multi-class classifier uses an ensemble of LSTM, Convolutional Neural Network and Artificial Neural Network classifiers to detect the type of attacks. The model training is performed in the batch layer, while real-time evaluation is carried out through model inferences in the speed layer of the Lambda architecture. The proposed approach gives high accuracy of over 99.93% and saves useful processing time due to the multi-pronged classification strategy and using the lambda architecture.