Securing IoT networks: a machine learning approach for detecting unusual traffic patterns

The exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) poses substantial security challenges due to its heterogeneous, decentralized nature. This paper introduces a machine learning (ML) framework to enhance IoT network security by identifying and mitigating anomalous traffic patterns. The combination of the NBaIoT and UNSW-NB15 datasets enabled us to construct a complete environment for analysis. We used an extensive data preprocessing pipeline, including cleaning, integration, transformation, and feature engineering, to prepare the datasets for ML. We constructed a framework that was assessed with several types of ML models and achieved good results: the decision tree model with support of 95% accuracy and 93% precision with 92% recall and F1 score of 92.5; the SVM model with the backing of 96% accuracy and 94% precision with 92 and 95 recall and F1 score respectively; the random forest model with support of 97% accuracy and 96% precision with 92 and 95 recall and F1 score respectively. The best performance of our neural network model was 98% precision, 97% recall, and 97.5% perception, respectively. These findings indicate that our neural network-based framework is more effective at detecting and preventing IoT traffic anomalies than other models, in both accuracy and overall efficiency. The results highlight the potential of using ML to deliver robust, scalable, real-time anomaly-detection solutions for an IoT network. Further studies will aim to improve it by implementing the model in practice and incorporating additional datasets and machine-learning methods to make the model more flexible and resilient.