A Comparative Analysis of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms for IoT Attack Detection and Classification

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has introduced significant security challenges, necessitating robust attack detection mechanisms. This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of ten supervised learning algorithms for IoT attack detection and classification, addressing the critical challenge of balancing detection accuracy with practical deployment constraints. Using the CICIoT2023 dataset, encompassing data from 105 IoT devices and 33 attack types, we evaluate Naive Bayes, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Logistic Regression (LR), k-NN, XGBoost, Random Forest (RF), LightGBM, GRU, LSTM, and CNN algorithms based on some performance metrics. The comparative test results show superior performance to the traditional ensemble approach, with RF achieving 99.29% accuracy and leading precision (82.30%), followed closely by XGBoost with 99.26% accuracy and 79.60% precision. Deep learning approaches also demonstrate strong capabilities, with CNN achieving 98.33% accuracy and 71.18% precision, though these metrics indicate ongoing challenges with class imbalance. The analysis of confusion matrices reveals varying success across different attack types, with some algorithms showing perfect detection rates for certain attacks while struggling with others. The study highlights a crucial distinction in IoT security: while high precision remains important, the potentially catastrophic impact of missed attacks necessitates equal attention to recall metrics, as evidenced by the varying recall rates across algorithms (RF: 72.19%, XGBoost: 71.69%, CNN: 64.72%). These findings provide vital insights for developing balanced, context-aware intrusion detection systems for IoT environments, emphasizing the need to consider performance metrics and practical deployment constraints.