Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) technology has various network applications and has attracted the interest of many research and industrial communities. Particularly, the number of vulnerable or unprotected IoT devices has drastically increased, along with the amount of suspicious activity, such as IoT botnet and large-scale cyber-attacks. In order to address this security issue, researchers have deployed machine and deep learning methods to detect attacks targeting compromised IoT devices. Despite these efforts, developing an efficient and effective attack detection approach for resource-constrained IoT devices remains a challenging task for the security research community. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective IoT botnet attack detection approach. The proposed approach relies on a Fisher-score-based feature selection method along with a genetic-based extreme gradient boosting (GXGBoost) model in order to determine the most relevant features and to detect IoT botnet attacks. The Fisher score is a representative filter-based feature selection method used to determine significant features and discard irrelevant features through the minimization of intra-class distance and the maximization of inter-class distance. On the other hand, GXGBoost is an optimal and effective model, used to classify the IoT botnet attacks. Several experiments were conducted on a public botnet dataset of IoT devices. The evaluation results obtained using holdout and 10-fold cross-validation techniques showed that the proposed approach had a high detection rate using only three out of the 115 data traffic features and improved the overall performance of the IoT botnet attack detection process.

An Intrusion detection system is an essential security tool for protecting services and infrastructures of wireless sensor networks from unseen and unpredictable attacks. Few works of machine learning have been proposed for intrusion detection in wireless sensor networks and that have achieved reasonable results. However, these works still need to be more accurate and efficient against imbalanced data problems in network traffic. In this paper, we proposed a new model to detect intrusion attacks based on a genetic algorithm and an extreme gradient boosting (XGBoot) classifier, called GXGBoost model. The latter is a gradient boosting model designed for improving the performance of traditional models to detect minority classes of attacks in the highly imbalanced data traffic of wireless sensor networks. A set of experiments were conducted on wireless sensor network-detection system (WSN-DS) dataset using holdout and 10 fold cross validation techniques. The results of 10 fold cross validation tests revealed that the proposed approach outperformed the state-of-the-art approaches and other ensemble learning classifiers with high detection rates of 98.2%, 92.9%, 98.9%, and 99.5% for flooding, scheduling, grayhole, and blackhole attacks, respectively, in addition to 99.9% for normal traffic.