Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) supports human endeavors by creating smart environments. Although the IoT has enabled many human comforts and enhanced business opportunities, it has also opened the door to intruders or attackers who can exploit the technology, either through attacks or by eluding it. Hence, security and privacy are the key concerns for IoT networks. To date, numerous intrusion detection systems (IDS) have been designed for IoT networks, using various optimization techniques. However, with the increase in data dimensionality, the search space has expanded dramatically, thereby posing significant challenges to optimization methods, including particle swarm optimization (PSO). In light of these challenges, this paper proposes a method called improved dynamic sticky binary particle swarm optimization (IDSBPSO) for feature selection, introducing a dynamic search space reduction strategy and a number of dynamic parameters to enhance the searchability of sticky binary particle swarm optimization (SBPSO). Through this approach, an IDS was designed to detect malicious data traffic in IoT networks. The proposed model was evaluated using two IoT network datasets: IoTID20 and UNSW-NB15. It was observed that in most cases, IDSBPSO obtained either higher or similar accuracy even with less number of features. Moreover, IDSBPSO substantially reduced computational cost and prediction time, compared with conventional PSO-based feature selection methods.