Deep Transfer Learning: A Novel Collaborative Learning Model for Cyberattack Detection Systems in IoT Networks

Federated learning (FL) has recently become an effective approach for cyberattack detection systems, especially in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. By distributing the learning process across IoT gateways, FL can improve learning efficiency, reduce communication overheads, and enhance privacy for cyberattack detection systems. However, one of the biggest challenges for deploying FL in IoT networks is the unavailability of labeled data and dissimilarity of data features for training. In this article, we propose a novel collaborative learning framework that leverages Transfer Learning (TL) to overcome these challenges. Particularly, we develop a novel collaborative learning approach that enables a target network with unlabeled data to effectively and quickly learn “knowledge” from a source network that possesses abundant labeled data. It is important that the state-of-the-art studies require the participated data sets of networks to have the same features, thus limiting the efficiency, flexibility, as well as scalability of intrusion detection systems. However, our proposed framework can address these problems by exchanging the learning knowledge among various deep learning (DL) models, even when their data sets have different features. Extensive experiments on recent real-world cybersecurity data sets show that the proposed framework can improve more than 40% as compared to the state-of-the-art DL-based approaches.