Cognitive Memory-Guided AutoEncoder for Effective Intrusion Detection in Internet of Things

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, intrusion detection has become a key technology that provides solid protection for IoT devices from network intrusion. At present, artificial intelligence technologies have been widely used in the intrusion detection task in previous methods. However, unknown attacks may also occur with the development of the network and the attack samples are difficult to collect, resulting in unbalanced sample categories. In this case, the previous intrusion detection methods have the problem of high false positive rates and low detection accuracy, which restricts the application of these methods in a real situation. In this article, we propose a novel method based on deep neural networks to tackle the intrusion detection task, which is termed
Cognitive Memory-guided AutoEncoder
(CMAE). The CMAE method leverages a memory module to enhance the ability to store normal feature patterns while inheriting the advantages of autoencoder. Therefore, it is robust to the imbalanced samples. Besides, using the reconstruction error as an evaluation criterion to detect attacks effectively detects unknown attacks. To obtain superior intrusion detection performance, we propose feature reconstruction loss and feature sparsity loss to constrain the proposed memory module, promoting the discriminative of memory items and the ability of representation for normal data. Compared to previous state-of-the-art methods, sufficient experimental results reveal that the proposed CMAE method achieves excellent performance and effectiveness for intrusion detection.