Deep Learning: The Frontier for Distributed Attack Detection in Fog-to-Things Computing

The increase in the number and diversity of smart objects has raised substantial cybersecurity challenges due to the recent exponential rise in the occurrence and sophistication of attacks. Although cloud computing has transformed the world of business in a dramatic way, its centralization hammers the application of distributed services such as security mechanisms for IoT applications. The new and emerging IoT applications require novel cybersecurity controls, models, and decisions distributed at the edge of the network. Despite the success of the existing cryptographic solutions in the traditional Internet, factors such as system development flaws, increased attack surfaces, and hacking skills have proven the inevitability of detection mechanisms. The traditional approaches such as classical machine-learning-based attack detection mechanisms have been successful in the last decades, but it has already been proven that they have low accuracy and less scalability for cyber-attack detection in massively distributed nodes such as IoT. The proliferation of deep learning and hardware technology advancement could pave a way to detecting the current level of sophistication of cyber-attacks in edge networks. The application of deep networks has already been successful in big data areas, and this indicates that fog-to-things computing can be the ultimate beneficiary of the approach for attack detection because a massive amount of data produced by IoT devices enable deep models to learn better than shallow algorithms. In this article, we propose a novel distributed deep learning scheme of cyber-attack detection in fog-to-things computing. Our experiments show that deep models are superior to shallow models in detection accuracy, false alarm rate, and scalability.