Two-Dimensional Projection-Based Wireless Intrusion Classification Using Lightweight EfficientNet

Internet of Things (IoT) networks leverage wireless communication protocols, which adversaries can exploit. Impersonation attacks, injection attacks, and flooding are several examples of different attacks existing in Wi-Fi networks. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) became one solution to distinguish those attacks from benign traffic. Deep learning techniques have been intensively utilized to classify the attacks. However, the main issue of utilizing deep learning models is projecting the data, notably tabular data, into an image. This study proposes a novel projection from wireless network attacks data into a grid-based image for feeding one of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, EfficientNet. We define the particular sequence of placing the attribute values in a grid that would be captured as an image. Combining the most important subset of attributes and EfficientNet, we aim for an accurate and lightweight IDS module deployed in IoT networks. We examine the proposed model using the Wi-Fi attacks dataset, called the AWID2 dataset. We achieve the best performance by a 99.91% F1 score and 0.11% false-positive rate. In addition, our proposed model achieved comparable results with other statistical machine learning models, which shows that our proposed model successfully exploited the spatial information of tabular data to maintain detection accuracy.