A robust malware traffic classifier to combat security breaches in industry 4.0 applications

Abstract

SummaryIndustry 4.0 integrates cyber systems, physical devices, and digital networks to automate the industrial process. Many sectors aim to adopt the best practices outlined in Industry 4.0. This indicates well for the future networking of an increasing number of devices. As crucial as intelligent automation is, it is essential that it be protected. The proliferation of Internet‐enabled gadgets could raise vulnerability to a variety of threats, malware among them. Intruders see a synthesis of factors as a chance to carry out their malicious plan. Keeping sensitive data and information protected from malicious software is a high responsibility for all industries. It is critical to have both a trustworthy approach and a large dataset to work with when constructing a malware traffic classifier. Malware's capacity to elude detection by antivirus programs improves with the day. Because this malware has the potential to compromise the entire network, establishing a malware traffic classifier requires a strong approach. As the number of data increases, the classifier has a harder time distinguishing between benign and malicious network entries. As a result, weighing too many factors is a time‐consuming process. To assist with these types of real‐world challenges, we construct an effective hybrid selection component, which is subsequently followed by a neural network classifier in this research. The Malware traffic classifier provided here selects the principal feature using filter and wrapper techniques. The feature columns provided by the feature selection program are used to construct a neural network‐based binary malware classifier. The given malware traffic classification framework was tested using the MTA‐KDD'19 dataset. We set up an experiment in this investigation to examine the way different feature counts perform using a neural‐based classifier. The suggested framework achieves 96.8% accuracy while just considering the bare minimum of five features, which is a substantial increase over alternative methods.