Toward generating a large-scale IoT-Zwave intrusion detection dataset: Smart device profiling, intruders behavior, and traffic characterization

Abstract

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced critical security challenges, making IoT ecosystems a prime target for cyber threats. Traditional security measures, relying on predefined signatures and static rules, struggle to detect sophisticated attacks that evolve dynamically. While machine learning and deep learning have improved IoT security, their effectiveness is fundamentally limited by the quality and diversity of available datasets. Existing IoT security datasets suffer from numerous shortcomings, including limited device diversity, inadequate threat coverage, the absence of real-world user and environment interaction, a lack of IoT-specific attacks, insufficient data volume, outdated threat scenarios, a lack of multimodal data, and a lack of support for multi-protocol analysis. To bridge this gap, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the top 30 publicly available IoT smart home datasets, identifying 22 critical shortcomings that hinder their applicability in security research. To address these limitations, we introduce BCCC-IoT-IDS-Zwave-2025, the most extensive and diverse IoT smart home dataset to date, developed over five months using a large-scale testbed comprising more than 50 IoT devices and encompassing over 80 distinct attack scenarios. Unlike prior datasets that focus primarily on IP network-layer traffic, our dataset integrates multi-source data, including IP-based network traffic, IoT-Zwave communication signals, device activity, and MQTT-based traffic and logs, with attack scenarios specifically designed for each data source, enabling a holistic view of IoT threats. To further enhance IoT threat analysis, we developed IoT-ZwaveNetLyzer, the first dedicated traffic analyzer for Z-Wave networks, addressing the gap left by traditional PC-focused tools. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the dataset’s effectiveness, with state-of-the-art classifiers achieving an average detection accuracy exceeding 95% and a false positive rate as low as 2.2% on average, establishing BCCC-IoT-IDS-Zwave-2025 as a cornerstone for future IoT security research and the development of advanced detection methodologies.