The Internet of Things (IoT) has garnered considerable attention from academic and industrial circles as a pivotal technology in recent years. The escalation of security risks is observed to be associated with the growing interest in IoT applications. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) have been devised as viable instruments for identifying and averting malicious actions in this context. Several techniques described in academic papers are thought to be very accurate, but they cannot be used in the real world because the datasets used to build and test the models do not accurately reflect and simulate the IoT network. Existing methods, on the other hand, deal with these issues, but they are not good enough for commercial use because of their lack of precision, low detection rate, receiver operating characteristic (ROC), and false acceptance rate (FAR). The effectiveness of these solutions is predominantly dependent on individual learners and is consequently influenced by the inherent limitations of each learning algorithm. This study introduces a new approach for detecting intrusion attacks in an IoT network, which involves the use of an ensemble learning technique based on gray wolf optimizer (GWO). The novelty of this study lies in the proposed voting gray wolf optimizer (GWO) ensemble model, which incorporates two crucial components: a traffic analyzer and a classification phase engine. The model employs a voting technique to combine the probability averages of the base learners. Secondly, the combination of feature selection and feature extraction techniques is to reduce dimensionality. Thirdly, the utilization of GWO is employed to optimize the parameters of ensemble models. Similarly, the approach employs the most authentic intrusion detection datasets that are accessible and amalgamates multiple learners to generate ensemble learners. The hybridization of information gain (IG) and principal component analysis (PCA) was employed to reduce dimensionality. The study utilized a novel GWO ensemble learning approach that incorporated a decision tree, random forest, K-nearest neighbor, and multilayer perceptron for classification. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed model, two authentic datasets, namely, BoT-IoT and UNSW-NB15, were scrutinized. The GWO-optimized ensemble model demonstrates superior accuracy when compared to other machine learning-based and deep learning models. Specifically, the model achieves an accuracy rate of 99.98%, a DR of 99.97%, a precision rate of 99.94%, an ROC rate of 99.99%, and an FAR rate of 1.30 on the BoT-IoT dataset. According to the experimental results, the proposed ensemble model optimized by GWO achieved an accuracy of 100%, a DR of 99.9%, a precision of 99.59%, an ROC of 99.40%, and an FAR of 1.5 when tested on the UNSW-NB15 dataset.
