Securing Resource-Constrained IoT Nodes: Towards Intelligent Microcontroller-Based Attack Detection in Distributed Smart Applications

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become an inseparable part of our lives. With the growing demand for Smart Applications, it becomes clear that IoT will bring regular automation and intelligent sensing to a new level thus improving quality of life. The core component of the IoT ecosystem is data which exists in various forms and formats. The collected data is then later used to create context awareness and make meaningful decisions. Besides an undoubtedly large number of advantages from the usage of IoT, there exist numerous challenges attributed to the security of objects that cannot be neglected for uninterrupted services. The Mirai botnet attack demonstrated that the IoT system is susceptible to different forms of cyberattacks. While advanced data analytics and Machine Learning have proved efficiency in various applications of cybersecurity, those still have not been explored enough in the literature from the applicability perspective in the domain of resource-constrained IoT. Several architectures and frameworks have been proposed for defining the ways for analyzing the data, yet mostly investigating off-chip analysis. In this contribution, we show how an Artificial Neural Network model can be trained and deployed on trivial IoT nodes for detecting intelligent similarity-based network attacks. This article proposes a concept of the resource-constrained intelligent system as a part of the IoT infrastructure to be able to harden the cybersecurity on microcontrollers. This work will serve as a stepping stone for the application of Artificial Intelligence on devices with limited computing capabilities such as end-point IoT nodes.