Variational Few-Shot Learning for Microservice-Oriented Intrusion Detection in Distributed Industrial IoT

Along with the popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) techniques with several computational paradigms, such as cloud and edge computing, microservice has been viewed as a promising architecture in large-scale application design and deployment. Due to the limited computing ability of edge devices in distributed IoT, only a small scale of data can be used for model training. In addition, most of the machine-learning-based intrusion detection methods are insufficient when dealing with imbalanced dataset under limited computing resources. In this article, we propose an optimized intra/inter-class-structure-based variational few-shot learning (OICS-VFSL) model to overcome a specific out-of-distribution problem in imbalanced learning, and to improve the microservice-oriented intrusion detection in distributed IoT systems. Following a newly designed VFSL framework, an intra/inter-class optimization scheme is developed using reconstructed feature embeddings, in which the intra-class distance is optimized based on the approximation during a variation Bayesian process, while the inter-class distance is optimized based on the maximization of similarities during a feature concatenation process. An intelligent intrusion detection algorithm is, then, introduced to improve the multiclass classification via a nonlinear neural network. Evaluation experiments are conducted using two public datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, especially in detecting novel attacks with extremely imbalanced data, compared with four baseline methods.