A Two-Level Hybrid Model for Anomalous Activity Detection in IoT Networks

In this paper we propose a two-level hybrid anomalous activity detection model for intrusion detection in IoT networks. The level-1 model uses flow-based anomaly detection, which is capable of classifying the network traffic as normal or anomalous. The flow-based features are extracted from the CICIDS2017 and UNSW-15 datasets. If an anomaly activity is detected then the flow is forwarded to the level-2 model to find the category of the anomaly by deeply examining the contents of the packet. The level-2 model uses Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) to select significant features and Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE) for oversampling and Edited Nearest Neighbors (ENN) for cleaning the CICIDS2017 and UNSW-15 datasets. Our proposed model precision, recall and F score for level-1 were measured 100% for the CICIDS2017 dataset and 99% for the UNSW-15 dataset, while the level-2 model precision, recall, and F score were measured at 100 % for the CICIDS2017 dataset and 97 % for the UNSW-15 dataset. The predictor we introduce in this paper provides a solid framework for the development of malicious activity detection in IoT networks.