A lightweight framework to secure IoT devices with limited resources in cloud environments

Vivek Kumar Pandey, Dinesh Sahu, Shiv Prakash*, Rajkumar Singh Rathore*, Pratibha Dixit, Iryna Hunko*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Billions of IoT devices increasingly function as gateways to cloud infrastructures, making them an inevitable target of cyber threats because of the limited resources and low processing capabilities of IoT devices. This paper proposes a lightweight decision tree-based intrusion detection framework suitable for real-time anomaly detection in a resource-constrained IoT environment. Finally, the model also makes use of a novel leaf-cut feature optimization strategy and tight adaptive cloud edge intelligence to achieve high accuracy while minimizing memory and computation demand. In terms of memory, they also use only 12.5 MB in it and evaluated on benchmark datasets including NSL-KDD and Bot-IoT, it gives an accuracy of 98.2% and 97.9%, respectively, and less than 1% false positives, thereby giving up to 6.8% accuracy over some traditional models such as SVM and Neural Networks and up to 78% less energy. It is deployed on Raspberry Pi nodes and can do real-time inference in less than 1 ms and 1,250 samples/sec. Due to the energy efficient, scalable, and interpretable architecture of the proposed solution, it can be implemented as a security solution for IoT use cases in Smart cities, industrial automation, health care, and autonomous vehicles.
Original languageEnglish
Article number26009
Pages (from-to)26009
JournalScientific Reports
Volume15
Issue number1
Early online date17 Jul 2025
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Jul 2025

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