Reinforcement Learning for IoT Security: A Comprehensive Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews how reinforcement learning techniques are applied to enhance security in IoT systems, covering attack types, defense strategies, and recent research trends in the field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of reinforcement learning-based security solutions for IoT, including applications to CPS like smart grids and transportation.

Findings

Reinforcement learning effectively detects and mitigates IoT cyber-attacks.

Deep reinforcement learning enhances adaptive security measures.

The survey summarizes recent attacks and countermeasures using RL in IoT.

Abstract

The number of connected smart devices has been increasing exponentially for different Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Security has been a long run challenge in the IoT systems which has many attack vectors, security flaws and vulnerabilities. Securing billions of B connected devices in IoT is a must task to realize the full potential of IoT applications. Recently, researchers have proposed many security solutions for IoT. Machine learning has been proposed as one of the emerging solutions for IoT security and Reinforcement learning is gaining more popularity for securing IoT systems. Reinforcement learning, unlike other machine learning techniques, can learn the environment by having minimum information about the parameters to be learned. It solves the optimization problem by interacting with the environment adapting the parameters on the fly. In this paper, we present an comprehensive survey of different types of cyber-attacks against different IoT systems and then we present reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning based security solutions to combat those different types of attacks in different IoT systems. Furthermore, we present the Reinforcement learning for securing CPS systems (i.e., IoT with feedback and control) such as smart grid and smart transportation system. The recent important attacks and countermeasures using reinforcement learning B in IoT are also summarized in the form of tables. With this paper, readers can have a more thorough understanding of IoT security attacks and countermeasures using Reinforcement Learning, as well as research trends in this area.