Advanced Hybrid Techniques for Cyberattack Detection and Defense in IoT Networks

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a vast network of devices connected to the Internet, making it easier for users to connect to modern technology. However, the complexity of these networks and the large volume of data pose significant challenges in protecting them from persistent cyberattacks, such as distributed denial‐of‐service (DDoS) attacks and spoofing. It has become necessary to use intrusion detection systems and protect these networks. Existing intrusion detection systems for IoT networks face many problems and limitations, including high false alarm rates and delayed detection. Also, the datasets used for training may be outdated or sparse, which reduces the model's accuracy, and mechanisms may not be used to defend the network when any intrusion is detected. To address these limitations, a new hybrid deep learning and machine learning methodology is proposed that contributes to detecting DDoS and spoofing attacks, reducing false alarms, and then implementing the necessary defensive measures. In proposed hybrid methodology consists of three stages: the first stage is to propose a hybrid method for feature selection consisting of techniques (correlation coefficient and sequential feature selector); the second stage is to propose a hybrid model by integrating deep learning neural networks with a machine learning classifier (cascaded long short‐term memory [LSTM] and Naive Bayes classifier); and in the third stage, improving network defense mechanisms and blocking ports after detecting threats and maintaining network integrity. In training and evaluating the performance of the proposed methodology, three datasets (CIC‐DDoS2019, CIC‐IoT2023, and CIC‐IoV2024) were used, and these data were also balanced to obtain effective results. The accuracy of 99.91%, 99.88%, and 99.77% was obtained. Also, a cross‐validation technique was used with the test data to ensure no overfitting. The proposed methodology has proven its high performance in detecting attacks, as it provides a powerful solution to enhance the security of IoT networks and protect them from cyberattacks, as it can be applied in many fields and to other attacks.