IoT-DeepSense: Behavioral Security Detection of IoT Devices Based on Firmware Virtualization and Deep Learning

Recently, IoT devices have become the targets of large-scale cyberattacks, and their security issues have been increasingly serious. However, due to the limited memory and battery power of IoT devices, it is hardly possible to install traditional security software, such as antivirus software for security defense. Meanwhile, network-based traffic detection is difficult to obtain the internal behavior states and conduct in-depth security analysis because more and more IoT devices use encrypted traffic. Therefore, how to obtain complex security behaviors and states inside IoT devices and perform security detection and defense is an issue that needs to be solved urgently. Aiming at this issue, we propose IoT-DeepSense, a behavioral security detection system of IoT devices based on firmware virtualization and deep learning. IoT-DeepSense constructs the real operating environment of the IoT device system to capture the fine-grained system behaviors and then leverages an LSTM-based IoT system behavior abnormality detection approach to effectively extract the hidden features of the system’s behavior sequence and enforce the security detection of the abnormal behavior of the IoT devices. The design and implementation of IoT-DeepSense are carried out on an independent Internet of things behavior detection server, without modifying the limited resources of IoT devices, and have strong scalability. The evaluation results show that IoT-DeepSense achieves a high behavioral detection rate of 92%, with negligible impact on the performance of IoT devices.