A Machine Learning Approach to Detect Denial of Sleep Attacks in Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) has rapidly evolved into a central component of today’s technological landscape, enabling seamless connectivity and communication among a vast array of devices. It underpins automation, real-time monitoring, and smart infrastructure, serving as a foundation for Industry 4.0 and paving the way toward Industry 5.0. Despite the potential of IoT systems to transform industries, these systems face a number of challenges, most notably the lack of processing power, storage space, and battery life. Whereas cloud and fog computing help to relieve computational and storage constraints, energy limitations remain a severe impediment to long-term autonomous operation. Among the threats that exploit this weakness, the Denial-of-Sleep (DoSl) attack is particularly problematic because it prevents nodes from entering low-power states, leading to battery depletion and degraded network performance. This research investigates machine-learning (ML) and deep-learning (DL) methods for identifying such energy-wasting behaviors to protect IoT energy resources. A dataset was generated in a simulated IoT environment under multiple DoSl attack conditions to validate the proposed approach. Several ML and DL models were trained and tested on this data to discover distinctive power-consumption patterns related to the attacks. The experimental results confirm that the proposed models can effectively detect anomalous behaviors associated with DoSl activity, demonstrating their potential for energy-aware threat detection in IoT networks. Specifically, the Random Forest and Decision Tree classifiers achieved accuracies of 98.57% and 97.86%, respectively, on the held-out 25% test set, while the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model reached 97.92% accuracy under a chronological split, confirming effective temporal generalization. All evaluations were conducted in a simulated environment, and the paper also outlines potential pathways for future physical testbed deployment.