Samiha Mirza

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become widely adopted in businesses, organizations, and daily lives. They are usually characterized by transferring and processing sensitive data. Attackers have exploited this prospect of IoT devices to compromise user data’s integrity and confidentiality. Considering the dynamic nature of the attacks, artificial intelligence (AI)-based techniques incorporating machine learning (ML) are promising techniques for identifying such attacks. However, the dataset being utilized features engineering techniques, and the kind of classifiers play significant roles in how accurate AI-based predictions are. Therefore, for the IoT environment, there is a need to contribute more to this context by evaluating different AI-based techniques on datasets that effectively capture the environment’s properties. In this paper, we evaluated various ML models with the consideration of both binary and multiclass classification models validated on a new dedicated IoT dataset. Moreover, we investigated the impact of different features engineering techniques including correlation analysis and information gain. The experimental work conducted on bagging, k-nearest neighbor (KNN), J48, random forest (RF), logistic regression (LR), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models revealed that RF achieved the highest performance across all experiment sets, with a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of 99.9%.

The World Wide Web services are essential in our daily lives and are available to communities through Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Attackers utilize such means of communication and create malicious URLs to conduct fraudulent activities and deceive others by creating deceptive and misleading websites and domains. Such threats open the doors for many critical attacks such as spams, spyware, phishing, and malware. Therefore, detecting malicious URL is crucially important to prevent the occurrence of many cybercriminal activities. In this study, we examined a set of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to detect malicious websites using a dataset comprising 66,506 records of URLs. We engineered three different types of features including lexical-based, network-based and content-based features. To extract the most discriminative features in the dataset, we applied several features selection algorithms, namely, correlation analysis, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and chi-square. Finally, we conducted a comparative performance evaluation for several ML and DL models considering set of criteria commonly used to evaluate such models. Results depicted that Naïve Bayes (NB) was the best model for detecting malicious URLs using the applied data with an accuracy of 96%. This research has made contribution to the field by conducting significant features engineering and analysis to identify the best features for malicious URLs predictions, compare different models and achieve a high accuracy using a large new URL dataset.