SkipGateNet: A Lightweight CNN-LSTM Hybrid Model with Learnable Skip Connections for Efficient Botnet Attack Detection in IoT

The rise of Internet of Things (IoT) has led to increased security risks, particularly from botnet attacks that exploit IoT device vulnerabilities. This situation necessitates effective Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), that are accurate, lightweight, and fast (having less inference time), designed particularly to detect botnet attacks in resource constrained IoT devices. This paper proposes SkipGateNet, a novel deep learning model designed for detecting Mirai and Bashlite botnet attacks in resource constrained IoT and fog computing environments. SkipGateNet is a lightweight, fast model combining 1D-Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers. The novelty of this model lies in the integration of ‘Learnable Skip Connections’. These connections feature gating mechanisms that enhance detection by focusing on relevant features and ignoring irrelevant ones. They add adaptability to the architecture, performing feature selection and propagating only essential features to deeper layers. Tested on the N-BaIoT dataset, SkipGateNet efficiently detects ten types of botnet attacks, with a remarkable test accuracy of 99.91%. It is also compact (2596.87 KB) and demonstrates a quick inference time of 8.0 milliseconds, suitable for real-time implementation in resource-limited settings. While evaluating its performance, parameters like precision, recall, accuracy, and F1 score were considered, along with statistical reliability measures like Cohen’s Kappa Coefficient and Matthews Correlation Coefficient. These highlight its reliability and effectiveness in IoT security challenges. The paper also compares SkipGateNet to existing models and four other deep learning architectures, including two sequential CNN architectures, a simple CNN+LSTM architecture, and a CNN+LSTM with standard skip connections. SkipGateNet surpasses all in accuracy and inference time, demonstrating its superiority in addressing IoT security issues.