Anomaly detection in IoT-based healthcare: machine learning for enhanced security

Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) integration in healthcare improves patient care while also making healthcare delivery systems more effective and economical. To fully realize the advantages of IoT in healthcare, it is imperative to overcome issues with data security, interoperability, and ethical considerations. IoT sensors periodically measure the health-related data of the patients and share it with a server for further evaluation. At the server, different machine learning algorithms are applied which help in early diagnosis of diseases and issue alerts in case vital signs are out of the normal range. Different cyber attacks can be launched on IoT devices which can result in compromised security and privacy of applications such as health care. In this paper, we utilize the publicly available Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC) IoT dataset to model machine learning techniques for efficient detection of anomalous network traffic. The dataset consists of 33 types of IoT attacks which are divided into 7 main categories. In the current study, the dataset is pre-processed, and a balanced representation of classes is used in generating a non-biased supervised (Random Forest, Adaptive Boosting, Logistic Regression, Perceptron, Deep Neural Network) machine learning models. These models are analyzed further by eliminating highly correlated features, reducing dimensionality, minimizing overfitting, and speeding up training times. Random Forest was found to perform optimally across binary and multiclass classification of IoT Attacks with an approximate accuracy of 99.55% under both reduced and all feature space. This improvement was complimented by a reduction in computational response time which is essential for real-time attack detection and response.