An IoT Intrusion Detection Approach Based on Salp Swarm and Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

The Internet of Things has emerged as a significant and influential technology in modern times. IoT presents solutions to reduce the need for human intervention and emphasizes task automation. According to a Cisco report, there were over 14.7 billion IoT devices in 2023. However, as the number of devices and users utilizing this technology grows, so does the potential for security breaches and intrusions. For instance, insecure IoT devices, such as smart home appliances or industrial sensors, can be vulnerable to hacking attempts. Hackers might exploit these vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data or even control the devices remotely. To address and prevent this issue, this work proposes integrating intrusion detection systems (IDSs) with an artificial neural network (ANN) and a salp swarm algorithm (SSA) to enhance intrusion detection in an IoT environment. The SSA functions as an optimization algorithm that selects optimal networks for the multilayer perceptron (MLP). The proposed approach has been evaluated using three novel benchmarks: Edge‐IIoTset, WUSTL‐IIOT‐2021, and IoTID20. Additionally, various experiments have been conducted to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Additionally, a comparison is made between the proposed approach and several approaches from the literature, particularly SVM combined with various metaheuristic algorithms. Then, identify the most crucial features for each dataset to improve detection performance. The SSA‐MLP outperforms the other algorithms with 88.241%, 93.610%, and 97.698% for Edge‐IIoTset, IoTID20, and WUSTL, respectively.