IoT Anomaly Detection Via Device Interaction Graph

Abstract

With diverse functionalities and advanced platform applications, Internet of Things (IoT) devices extensively interact with each other, and these interactions govern the legitimate device state transitions. At the same time, attackers can easily manipulate these devices, and it is difficult to detect covert device control. In this work, we propose the device interaction graph, which uses device interactions to profile normal device behavior. We also formalize two types of device anomalies, and present an anomaly detection system CausalIoT. It can automatically construct the graph and validate runtime device events. For any violation of interaction executions, CausalIoT further checks whether it can trigger unexpected interaction executions and tracks the affected devices.1 Compared with existing methods, CausalIoT achieves the highest detection accuracy for abnormal device state transitions (95.2% precision and 96.8% recall). Moreover, we are the first to detect unexpected interaction executions, and CausalIoT successfully reports 91.9% anomaly chains on real-world testbeds.