IoT-AD: A Framework to Detect Anomalies Among Interconnected IoT Devices

In an Internet of Things (IoT) environment (e.g., smart home), several IoT devices may be available that are interconnected with each other. In such interconnected environments, a faulty or compromised IoT device could impact the operation of other IoT devices. In other words, anomalous behavior exhibited by an IoT device could propagate to other devices in an IoT environment. In this article, we argue that mitigating the propagation of the anomalous behavior exhibited by a device to other devices is equally important to detecting this behavior in the first place. In line with this observation, we present a framework, called IoT Anomaly Detector (IoT-AD), that can not only detect the anomalous behavior of IoT devices but also limit and recover from anomalous behavior that might have affected other devices. We implemented a prototype of IoT-AD, which we evaluated based on open-source IoT device data sets as well as through real-world deployment on a small-scale IoT testbed we have built. We have further evaluated IoT-AD in comparison to prior relevant approaches. Our evaluation results show that IoT-AD can identify anomalous behavior of IoT devices in less than 2.12 ms and with up to 98% of accuracy.