A Hybrid Framework Leveraging Whale Optimization and Deep Learning With Trust-Index for Attack Identification in IoT Networks

The rise of smart cities, smart homes, and smart health powered by the Internet of Things (IoT) presents significant challenges in design, deployment, and security. The seamless data processing across a complex network of interconnected devices in unprotected conditions makes it vulnerable to potential breaches, underscoring the need for robust security at various levels of the network. Traditional security methods based on statistics often struggle to comprehend data patterns and provide the desired level of security. This work proposes a novel hybrid framework that combines Whale Optimization and Deep Learning with a trust-index to identify malicious nodes engaging in various attacks such as DoS, DDoS, Drop attack, and Tamper Attacks, thus enhancing IoT node security. The developed framework first calculates a trust-index score for IoT nodes based on drop attack, tamper attack, replay attack, and multiple-max attack. Subsequently, it utilizes the trust index score in the Optimized Neural Network model to effectively identify the malicious IoT node. The neural network optimization is achieved through a fitness function that determines optimal weights using the Whale Optimization Algorithm. The proposed framework has been tested across varying network sizes, comprising 100, 500, and 1000 nodes. The resulting outcomes were evaluated against benchmark security methods such as Logical regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, Bayesian models, ANN, Elephant herding optimization, and Lion algorithm using metrics like specificity, sensitivity, accuracy, precision, False Positive Rate, False Negative Rate, False Discovery Rate, Error, F1 score, Matthews Correlation Coefficient, and Negative Predictive Value. The results reveal a notable enhancement in accuracy (26.63%, 13.04%, 17.78%, 30.52%, 22.45%, 4.26%, and 2.24%) for a 100-node network when compared to the benchmark security methods. Furthermore, the proposed framework consistently demonstrates strong performance even when applied to larger IoT networks with a higher node count.