Unsupervised Learning for Feature Selection: A Proposed Solution for Botnet Detection in 5G Networks

The world has seen exponential growth in deploying Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In recent years, connected IoT devices have surpassed the number of connected non-IoT devices. The number of IoT devices continues to grow and they are becoming a critical component of the national infrastructure. IoT devices' characteristics and inherent limitations make them attractive targets for hackers and cyber criminals. Botnet attack is one of the serious threats on the Internet today. This article proposes pattern-based feature selection methods as part of a machine learning (ML)-based botnet detection system. Specifically, two methods are proposed: the first is based on the most dominant pattern feature values and the second is based on maximal frequent itemset mining. The proposed feature selection method uses Gini impurity and an unsupervised clustering method to select the most influential features automatically. The evaluation results show that the proposed methods have improved the performance of the detection system. The developed system has a true positive rate of 100% and a false positive rate of 0% for best performing models. In addition, the proposed methods reduce the computational cost of the system as evidenced by the detection speed of the system.