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An Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System for IoT Environments using Autoencoder Neural Networks and TinyML
| International Journal of Computer Applications |
| Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
| Volume 187 - Number 59 |
| Year of Publication: 2025 |
| Authors: Hiba Kandil, Wiam Bouimejane, Mohammed Mouhcine, Hafssa Benaboud |
10.5120/ijca2025926000
|
Hiba Kandil, Wiam Bouimejane, Mohammed Mouhcine, Hafssa Benaboud . An Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System for IoT Environments using Autoencoder Neural Networks and TinyML. International Journal of Computer Applications. 187, 59 ( Nov 2025), 9-15. DOI=10.5120/ijca2025926000
Abstract
The scalable nature of IoT systems leads to continually evolving security challenges, threats, and device vulnerability to cyberattacks. The traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) struggle with the resource-limited nature of IoT devices. However, Machine Learning (ML) techniques have appeared as a promising solution for IDS, offering several benefits. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised Deep Learning model combined with TinyML principles for efficient deployment of Intrusion Detection Systems on IoT networks. The model is trained exclusively on normal network traffic and detects anomalies through reconstruction error. To enable deployment on constrained devices, the model is quantized and converted to Lite format, resulting in a lightweight version suitable for TinyML environments. Evaluation was conducted using the IoT-23 dataset and NS-3-based traffic simulation. The proposed system enables real-time, on-device threat detection while operating within the strict memory, latency, and energy constraints typical of embedded IoT environments.
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