Knowledge-Distilled Multi-Model Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for IoT Networks

Abstract

The growth of Internet of Things devices has expanded the number of attackable targets of advanced cyber threats by orders of magnitude, and the limited computational capabilities of IoT devices have made more traditional intrusion detection systems infeasible to execute at the edge. A Knowledge-Distilled Multi-Model Intrusion Detection and Prevention System is presented, which combines a Residual Graph Convolutional Network, Long Short-Term Memory classifier, and a Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Network enhanced with the student-only autoencoders through multi-loss knowledge distillation to create a high-performing Teacher ensemble and compresses its intelligence into an edge-deployed system. The system is evaluated using the IoT-23 benchmark of 325 million network flow records and attains 98.2% Teacher-Student fidelity, 0.94 Knowledge Retention Score, and 4.4x throughput increase with 82.7% reduction in the parameter and provides per-packet SHapely Additive exPlanation forensic explainability.