Pulse: an adaptive intrusion detection for the internet of things

The number of diverse interconnected Internet of Things (IoT) devices keeps increasing exponentially, introducing new security and privacy challenges. These devices tend to become more pervasive than mobile phones and already have access to very sensitive personal information such as usernames, passwords, etc., making them a target for cyber-attacks. Given that smart devices are vulnerable to a variety of attacks, they can be considered to be the weakest link for breaking into a secure infrastructure. For instance, IoT devices have recently been employed as part of botnets, such as Mirai, and have launched several of the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and spam attacks in history. As a result, there is a need to develop an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) dedicated to monitor IoT ecosystems, which will be able to adapt to this heterogeneous environment and detect malicious activity on the network. In this paper, we describe the initial stages of developing Pulse; a novel IDS for the IoT, which employs Machine Learning (ML) methodologies and is capable of successfully identifying network scanning probing and simple forms of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.