Edge-IoTDistilBERT: Fine-Tuning DistilBERT for Multi-Class Classification of Network Packet Attacks

This exponential proliferation of IoT devices is creating an ever-growing demand for efficient cybersecurity solutions in resource-constrained environments. In this study, we propose Edge-IoTDistilBERT, a fine-tuned DistilBERT model, intended for the multi-class classification of network packet attacks within IoT ecosystems. Our proposed model was trained on the Edge-IIoT dataset, representative of all traffic classes and attack variants with high accuracy of up to 99.99%, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions. The new preprocessing pipeline of PCAP to text would transform the network traffic to a textual form allowing the model to learn the pattern in the dataset and making it able to generalize its content. Our fine-tuned model show a robust result on imbalanced dataset with two diffrent splits namely 80–20 and 70–30. The result shown by Edge-IoTDistilBERT place this model as a feasible effective cybersecurity solution for IoT networks, offering a good trade-off between high performance and resource constraints linked to edge devices.