APAE: an IoT intrusion detection system using asymmetric parallel auto-encoder

In recent years, the world has dramatically moved toward using the internet of things (IoT), and the IoT has become a hot research field. Among various aspects of IoT, real-time cyber-threat protection is one of the most crucial elements due to the increasing number of cyber-attacks. However, current IoT devices often offer minimal security features and are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Therefore, it is crucial to develop tools to detect such attacks in real time. This paper presents a new and intelligent network intrusion detection system named APAE that is based on an asymmetric parallel auto-encoder and is able to detect various attacks in IoT networks. The encoder part of APAE has a lightweight architecture that contains two encoders in parallel, each one having three successive layers of convolutional filters. The first encoder is for extracting local features using standard convolutional layers and a positional attention module. The second encoder also extracts the long-range information using dilated convolutional layers and a channel attention module. The decoder part of APAE is different from its encoder and has eight successive transposed convolution layers. The proposed APAE approach has a lightweight and suitable architecture for real-time attack detection and provides very good generalization performance even after training using very limited training records. The efficacy of the APAE has been evaluated using three popular public datasets named UNSW-NB15, CICIDS2017, and KDDCup99, and the results showed the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Automated summary

The use of IoT has increased significantly in recent years, making real-time cyber-threat protection crucial. However, current IoT devices are often lacking security features and are vulnerable to attacks. Therefore, it is important to develop tools for real-time attack detection in IoT networks. This paper proposes a new intelligent network intrusion detection system called APAE, which utilizes an asymmetric parallel auto-encoder to effectively detect various attacks in IoT networks.