Anomaly Detection Framework in Fog-to-Things Communication for Industrial Internet of Things

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the industrial domain has led to the new term the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The IIoT includes several devices, applications, and services that connect the physical and virtual space in order to provide smart, cost-effective, and scalable systems. Although the IIoT has been deployed and integrated into a wide range of industrial control systems, preserving security and privacy of such a technology remains a big challenge. An anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can be an effective security solution for maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data transmitted in IIoT environments. In this paper, we propose an intelligent anomaly-based IDS framework in the context of fog-to-things communications to decentralize the cloud-based security solution into a distributed architecture (fog nodes) near the edge of the data source. The anomaly detection system utilizes minimum redundancy maximum relevance and principal component analysis as the featured engineering methods to select the most important features, reduce the data dimensionality, and improve detection performance. In the classification stage, anomaly-based ensemble learning techniques such as bagging, LPBoost, RUSBoost, and Adaboost models are implemented to determine whether a given flow of traffic is normal or malicious. To validate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed model, we evaluate our anomaly detection approach on a new driven IIoT dataset called X-IIoTID, which includes new IIoT protocols, various cyberattack scenarios, and different attack protocols. The experimental results demonstrated that our proposed anomaly detection method achieved a higher accuracy rate of 99.91% and a reduced false alarm rate of 0.1% compared to other recently proposed techniques.