DDoS attack detection in Edge-IIoT digital twin environment using deep learning approach

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and digital twins are redefining how digital models and physical systems interact. IIoT connects physical intelligence, and digital twins virtually represent their physical counterparts. With the rapid growth of Edge-IIoT, it is crucial to create security and privacy regulations to prevent vulnerabilities and threats (<i>i.e</i>., distributed denial of service (DDoS)). DDoS attacks use botnets to overload the target system with requests. In this study, we introduce a novel approach for detecting DDoS attacks in an Edge-IIoT digital twin-based generated dataset. The proposed approach is designed to retain already learned knowledge and easily adapt to new models in a continuous manner without retraining the deep learning model. The target dataset is publicly available and contains 157,600 samples. The proposed models M1, M2, and M3 obtained precision scores of 0.94, 0.93, and 0.93; recall scores of 0.91, 0.97, and 0.99; F1-scores of 0.93, 0.95, and 0.96; and accuracy scores of 0.93, 0.95, and 0.96, respectively. The results demonstrated that transferring previous model knowledge to the next model consistently outperformed baseline approaches.