Prior Knowledge based Advanced Persistent Threats Detection for IoT in a Realistic Benchmark

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices being deployed into networks is growing at a phenomenal pace, which makes IoT networks more vulnerable in the wireless medium. Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is malicious to most of the network facilities and the available attack data for training the machine learning-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is limited when compared to the normal traffic. Therefore, it is quite challenging to enhance the detection performance in order to mitigate the influence of APT. Therefore, Prior Knowledge Input (PKI) models are proposed and tested using the SCVIC-APT-2021 dataset. To obtain prior knowledge, the proposed PKI model pre-classifies the original dataset with unsupervised clustering method. Then, the obtained prior knowledge is incorporated into the supervised model to decrease training complexity and assist the supervised model in determining the optimal mapping between the raw data and true labels. The experimental findings indicate that the PKI model outperforms the supervised baseline, with the best macro average F1-score of 81.37%, which is 10.47% higher than the baseline.