Malware Detection for Internet of Things Using One-Class Classification

Abstract

The increasing usage of interconnected devices within the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) has significantly enhanced efficiency and utility in both personal and industrial settings but also heightened cybersecurity vulnerabilities, particularly through IoT malware. This paper explores the use of one-class classification, a method of unsupervised learning, which is especially suitable for unlabeled data, dynamic environments, and malware detection, which is a form of anomaly detection. We introduce the TF-IDF method for transforming nominal features into numerical formats that avoid information loss and manage dimensionality effectively, which is crucial for enhancing pattern recognition when combined with n-grams. Furthermore, we compare the performance of multi-class vs. one-class classification models, including Isolation Forest and deep autoencoder, that are trained with both benign and malicious NetFlow samples vs. trained exclusively on benign NetFlow samples. We achieve 100% recall with precision rates above 80% and 90% across various test datasets using one-class classification. These models show the adaptability of unsupervised learning, especially one-class classification, to the evolving malware threats in the IoT domain, offering insights into enhancing IoT security frameworks and suggesting directions for future research in this critical area.