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A privacy-preserving botnet detection approach in largescale cooperative IoT environment

  • S.I. : IoT-based Health Monitoring System
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Abstract

With the development of Internet-of-Things (IoT), our modern life has been greatly facilitated, while an exponentially growing number of vulnerable devices also breed a wonderful ground for botnet controllers,. However, existing detection approaches developed for individual traditional network area neglect cross-area privacy issue and resource restraint nature of IoT network and therefore impede their effectiveness of mitigating IoT botnet. In this work, we present a lightweight and privacy-preserving system, namely PPBotHunter, to detect botnet across multiple network areas. PPBotHunter implements a fuzzy matrix algorithm to retrieve effective bot similarity computation while ensuring a high privacy degree. This algorithm is designed based on a privacy-preserving scalar product computation technique (PPSPC) which enables PPBotHunter to be lightweight yet efficient. We utilize only time series feature to build the fuzzy matrices, which further improve the compatibility, energy-efficacy and resistance against heterogeneity. The theoretical analysis and detailed simulations illustrate the efficacy and effectiveness of our proposed botnet detection system.

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Acknowledgements

This work supports in part by National Key R&D Program of China (No.2018YFB2004200), National Science Foundation of China (No.61872100) and State Grid Corporation of China Co., Ltd technology project (No.5700-202155185A-00-00).

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  1. Yixin Li and Muyijie Zhu are contributed equally to this work.

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  1. Cyberspace Institute of Advanced Technology, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China

    Yixin Li, Muyijie Zhu, Xi Luo, Lihua Yin & Ye Fu

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Correspondence to Xi Luo or Lihua Yin.

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Li, Y., Zhu, M., Luo, X. et al. A privacy-preserving botnet detection approach in largescale cooperative IoT environment. Neural Comput & Applic 35, 13725–13737 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-022-06934-x

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