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LightFIDS: Lightweight and Hierarchical Federated IDS for Massive IoT in 6G Network

  • Research Article-Computer Engineering and Computer Science
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Abstract

IoT traffic on access networks is expected to increase significantly with the advent of 6G-enabled massive IoT networks. Nevertheless, current intrusion detection system (IDS) designs may be unsuitable for handling this expansion. The rapidly evolving IoT landscape may lead to decreased intrusion detection accuracy and increased communication and computation overheads due to centralization. Moreover, the conventional IoT infrastructure poses challenges for existing IDS solutions. To tackle these shortcomings, edge intelligence-empowered IDS strategies utilize federated learning (FL) architecture to design next-generation IDSs. In this work, we introduce LightFIDS, a lightweight federated IDS with a softwarized hierarchical architecture that leverages 6G enablers to enhance the security and scalability of massive IoT networks. To achieve this goal, we examined four well-known lightweight detection models—MLP, LSTM, GRU, and TCN—as local learning models and evaluated their impacts on the proposed hierarchical architecture by measuring the number of global rounds needed to converge, besides the accuracy and the F-score of the models. Our aim was to determine the communication overhead caused by the convergence in FL as the network scaled. In this investigation, we used a new, realistic dataset called Edge-lIoTset. Our findings demonstrate that our novel framework significantly outperforms classical FL in terms of communication cost, convergence, and scalability. We also extended our understanding of how different lightweight local learning models might behave, given various scaling scenarios in this comprehensive benchmarking study. To the best of our knowledge, there are no other benchmarking studies of this kind.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

    Asma Alotaibi & Ahmed Barnawi

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  1. Asma Alotaibi
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  2. Ahmed Barnawi
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Correspondence to Asma Alotaibi.

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Alotaibi, A., Barnawi, A. LightFIDS: Lightweight and Hierarchical Federated IDS for Massive IoT in 6G Network. Arab J Sci Eng 49, 4383–4399 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-023-08439-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-023-08439-8

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