Unsupervised Learning for Trustworthy IoT

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of unsupervised learning algorithms to assess and improve the trustworthiness of IoT data in dynamic, adversarial environments, highlighting their vulnerabilities and the need for advanced solutions.

Contribution

It models cyber trustworthiness in IoT crowd-sensing, evaluates existing algorithms' effectiveness against adversaries, and reveals their susceptibility to attacks in real-world datasets.

Findings

Unsupervised algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial attacks.

Concept drifts can obscure attacker detection.

Current methods need enhancement for IoT security.

Abstract

The advancement of Internet-of-Things (IoT) edge devices with various types of sensors enables us to harness diverse information with Mobile Crowd-Sensing applications (MCS). This highly dynamic setting entails the collection of ubiquitous data traces, originating from sensors carried by people, introducing new information security challenges; one of them being the preservation of data trustworthiness. What is needed in these settings is the timely analysis of these large datasets to produce accurate insights on the correctness of user reports. Existing data mining and other artificial intelligence methods are the most popular to gain hidden insights from IoT data, albeit with many challenges. In this paper, we first model the cyber trustworthiness of MCS reports in the presence of intelligent and colluding adversaries. We then rigorously assess, using real IoT datasets, the effectiveness and accuracy of well-known data mining algorithms when employed towards IoT security and privacy. By taking into account the spatio-temporal changes of the underlying phenomena, we demonstrate how concept drifts can masquerade the existence of attackers and their impact on the accuracy of both the clustering and classification processes. Our initial set of results clearly show that these unsupervised learning algorithms are prone to adversarial infection, thus, magnifying the need for further research in the field by leveraging a mix of advanced machine learning models and mathematical optimization techniques.