MACHINE LEARNING FOR IOT SECURITY: DETECTING AND MITIGATING CYBER ANOMALIES

Authors

  • Ashraf Osman Ibrahim Elsayed Department of Computing, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Seri Iskandar, Malaysia
  • Hiba Ahmed Department of Information Technology, College of Customs, Medical Science and Technology, Khartoum, Sudan
  • Razan Alharith School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
  • Nada Adam Department of Computer Science, the Applied College, Northern Border University, Arar, KSA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15282/ijsecs.11.1.2025.5.0137

Keywords:

Internet of Things (IoT), Cybersecurity, Cyber Anomalies, Anomaly Detection, Cyberattack Classification, Machine learning.

Abstract

Rapid IoT device proliferation creates critical security vulnerabilities often missed by conventional methods. This vital research evaluates seven machine learning models (Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Neural Networks, kNN, SVM, Decision Tree, and Naive Bayes) for robust IoT anomaly detection using comprehensive ToN-IoT and BoT-IoT datasets. Random Forest and Gradient Boosting significantly advanced IoT security, demonstrating superior, often perfect, and performance on key metrics like AUC, accuracy, and F1. Neural Networks also excelled. SVM and kNN achieved high accuracy but showed varied sensitivity to rare attacks. Naive Bayes struggled with data complexity, while Decision Tree's operational failure on one dataset stressed the need for careful validation. This study underscores machine learning's potential to enhance IoT resilience. Performance variations and challenges such as class imbalance necessitate tailored solutions. These findings establish a foundation for future work in ensemble methods, explainable AI (XAI), feature engineering, and strategies for managing large-scale imbalanced data to fortify IoT security.

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Published

2025-08-08

How to Cite

[1]
A. O. Ibrahim Elsayed, H. Ahmed, R. Alharith, and N. Adam, “MACHINE LEARNING FOR IOT SECURITY: DETECTING AND MITIGATING CYBER ANOMALIES”, IJSECS, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 59–69, Aug. 2025, doi: 10.15282/ijsecs.11.1.2025.5.0137.

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