Discretization-based ensemble model for robust learning in IoT
Anahita Namvar Chandra Thapa Salil S. Kanhere
IoT device identification is the process of recognizing and verifying
connected IoT devices to the network. This is an essential process for ensuring
that only authorized devices can access the network, and it is necessary for
network management and maintenance. In recent years, machine learning models
have been used widely for automating the process of identifying devices in the
network. However, these models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can
compromise their accuracy and effectiveness. To better secure device
identification models, discretization techniques enable reduction in the
sensitivity of machine learning models to adversarial attacks contributing to
the stability and reliability of the model. On the other hand, Ensemble methods
combine multiple heterogeneous models to reduce the impact of remaining noise
or errors in the model. Therefore, in this paper, we integrate discretization
techniques and ensemble methods and examine it on model robustness against
adversarial attacks. In other words, we propose a discretization-based ensemble
stacking technique to improve the security of our ML models. We evaluate the
performance of different ML-based IoT device identification models against
white box and black box attacks using a real-world dataset comprised of network
traffic from 28 IoT devices. We demonstrate that the proposed method enables
robustness to the models for IoT device identification.