A Lightweight Intrusion Detection System for Internet of Things: Clustering and Monte Carlo Cross-Entropy Approach

Our modern lives are increasingly shaped by the Internet of Things (IoT), as IoT devices monitor and manage everything from our homes to our workplaces, becoming an essential part of health systems and daily infrastructure. However, this rapid growth in IoT has introduced significant security challenges, leading to increased vulnerability to cyber attacks. To address these challenges, machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs)-traditionally considered a primary line of defense-have been deployed to monitor and detect malicious activities in IoT networks. Despite this, these IDS solutions often struggle with the inherent resource constraints of IoT devices, including limited computational power and memory. To overcome these limitations, we propose an approach to enhance intrusion detection efficiency. First, we introduce a recursive clustering method for data condensation, integrating compactness and entropy-driven sampling to select a highly representative subset from the larger dataset. Second, we adopt a Monte Carlo Cross-Entropy approach combined with a stability metric of features to consistently select the most stable and relevant features, resulting in a lightweight, efficient, and high-accuracy IoT-based IDS. Evaluation of our proposed approach on three IoT datasets from real devices (N-BaIoT, Edge-IIoTset, CICIoT2023) demonstrates comparable classification accuracy while significantly reducing training and testing times by 45× and 15×, respectively, and lowering memory usage by 18×, compared to competitor approaches.