Comparing Machine Learning and Deep Learning for IoT Botnet Detection
Rishabh Gandhi, Yanyan Li
Abstract
Botnets have become a major threat to Internet of Things (IoT) devices due to their low security settings out of the box and the lack of security awareness from end users. Many ports are open by default and default user credentials are left unchanged. To tackle the increasingly popular botnet attack, many detection approaches have been proposed. However, most of them are targeting on one particular approach or one botnet dataset. There is lacking a comprehensive comparison between different machine learning and deep learning approaches on this task under different datasets collected from different ways. In this work, we have measured the performance of 5 machine learning and 2 deep learning based approaches on 4 recently published IoT botnet datasets collected using real and virtual IoT devices under Mirai malware attack. Our comparison results have shown that random forest achieved the best detection accuracy as well as the shortest testing time.