A Systematic Investigation on Botnet Intrusion Detection Using Various Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly in an exponential manner due to its versatility in technology. This has led to many challenges in securing the IoT environment. Devices in IoT environments are vulnerable to various cyberattacks. Botnet-based attacks are predominant and widespread in nature. Due to insufficient memory and computational power, the IoT environment cannot handle the botnet attack that affects security. Identifying intrusions in IoT environments is another challenge for researchers. Finding unknown patterns in the data generated through IoT networks helps improve security in the IoT environment. Machine learning (ML) is a platform that helps identify patterns in the provided data. In this study, we present our research on classifying incoming data from the IoT as malicious or benign using machine learning techniques. We propose an ML-based botnet attack detection framework for nine commercial IoT devices that primarily target BASHLITE and Mirai botnet attacks. Rigorous pragmatic research was conducted on the N-BaIoT dataset, which was extracted from realtime IoT devices connected to a network. Using this framework, the results have been depicted, which can efficiently detect botnet attacks and can also be applied to any other types of attacks.