Implementation of lightweight machine learning-based intrusion detection system on IoT devices of smart homes

Smart home devices, also known as IoT devices, provide significant convenience; however, they also present opportunities for attackers to jeopardize homeowners’ security and privacy. Securing these IoT devices is a formidable challenge because of their limited computational resources. Machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have been implemented on the edge and the cloud; however, IDSs have not been embedded in IoT devices. To address this, we propose a novel machine learning-based two-layered IDS for smart home IoT devices, enhancing accuracy and computational efficiency. The first layer of the proposed IDS is deployed on a microcontroller-based smart thermostat, which uploads the data to a website hosted on a cloud server. The second layer of the IDS is deployed on the cloud side for classification of attacks. The proposed IDS can detect the threats with an accuracy of 99.50% at cloud level (multiclassification). For real-time testing, we implemented the Raspberry Pi 4-based adversary to generate a dataset for man-in-the-middle (MITM) and denial of service (DoS) attacks on smart thermostats. The results show that the XGBoost-based IDS detects MITM and DoS attacks in 3.51 ms on a smart thermostat with an accuracy of 97.59%.