A hybrid BiLSTM-CNN approach for intrusion detection for IoT applications

Intrusions in computer networks have increased significantly in recent times and network security mechanisms are not being developed at the same pace as intrusion attacks are evolving. Therefore, a need has arisen to improve intrusion detection systems (IDS) to make networks secure. This research focuses on anomaly-based IDS for security attacks. In this research, deep learning techniques such as Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are implemented and subsequently used to design a novel hybrid BiLSTM-CNN IDS for the Internet of Things (IoT) over UNSW-NB15 dataset. The proposed hybrid model is created by utilizing the advantages of both the BiLSTM and the CNN’s abilities to extract temporal and spatial features respectively. The models are run on GPU and CPU to illustrate their efficacy and match real-world IoT network communication behavior. The Deep Learning (DL) models are assessed on various aspects like Precision, Sensitivity, F1-Score, Miscalculation Rate, False Positive Rate, False Negative Rate, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient to evaluate the model’s robustness. The findings revealed that the hybrid model surpassed the BiLSTM and CNN models in all aspects for binary classification. Additionally, the proposed model is compared with the cutting-edge existing approaches in terms of different performance metrics and proven to be better than state-of-the-art models.