Defending Intrusion Detection Systems from Black-Box Adversarial Threats in OneM2M-Based IoT Networks

Abstract

With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT), critical infrastructures such as smart cities, industrial automation, precision healthcare, and intelligent transportation have seen a significant shift in their security landscape. As these critical infrastructures are increasingly depending on OneM2M standards for interoperability and scalable service management, they are simultaneously presenting a larger and more structured attack surface. One of the most serious and realistic threats in such scenarios is black-box adversarial attacks, in which an attacker can compromise Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL)-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) without having prior knowledge of the ML/DL model's architecture, parameters, and training data. To mitigate such a critical challenge, we propose a multi-stage framework specific to OneM2M-based IoT networks that can effectively counter transfer-based and query-based black-box adversarial attacks. Our framework's effectiveness will be tested on a dataset of 1.25 million labeled network flows collected from Azure IoT Hub-based IoT devices over a 10-day period. We will test the robustness of our framework against three adversarial attacks: FGSM with $\varepsilon=0.05$, PGD with 40 iterations and step size 0.01, and C&W with L2 optimization and 1,000 iterations. The proposed pipeline consists of four different mechanisms: (1) adversarial training with the use of mixed clean and adversarial samples, (2) traffic sanitization to minimize malicious and/or suspicious traffic flows before processing by the Common Service Entity (CSE), (3) the use of a black-box adversarial detector based on feature transformation, and (4) the use of an ensemble-based IDS to make use of the results of the Random Forest, XGBoost, MLP, and 1D-CNN-based IDSs via majority voting. The experimental results show that the proposed Ensemble + multi-defense configuration results in 98.1% accuracy, 98.3% TPR, and 1.7% FNR. Most notably, the proposed Ensemble + multi-defense configuration results in an ASR of 11.2%, which is down by 86% compared to the 82.3% ASR achieved by the baseline IDS. Notably, the proposed framework results in limited overheads in terms of RTT (increased by 8 ms), CPU (increased by 17%), and RAM (increased by 1.6 GB).