TL-IDS: A Transfer Learning Technique for Botnet Detection in IoT

With the exponential rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in our modern-day lifestyle, the potential danger of botnet intrusions has become inevitable. These botnet attacks cause extensive damage to both individual users and large organizations. In the realm of IoT botnet intrusion detection, learning-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) were proposed as a powerful strategy for identifying malicious behaviors and consolidating the security of IoT systems. Moreover, Transfer Learning (TL) techniques have emerged to overcome the problems of scarce data and the long training time of traditional learning approaches. This paper proposes an IDS for IoT networks based on the TL EfficientNet model. We train the system and validate it using the Bot-IoT network intrusion dataset. Our approach incorporates balancing the dataset, redundancy removal, dimensionality reduction, and transformation of the dataset into RGB images to be fed as input to the detection model. The findings of our experimental work prove that the proposed model is robust and effective, and it surpasses existing models with an accuracy of 99.53%, recall of 99.53%, and F1-score of 99.52%.